Early American Literature 1620-1820

Long before Captain John Smith established Jamestown in 1607, the European imagination had been entranced by rumors of the New Worlds plenty. But it was probably Captain Smith, rather than any other, who convinced English readers that there was an earthy paradise not far from their shores. In his Description of New England (1616) he wrote that Here nature and liberty afford us that freely which in England we want [lack], or it costs us dearly. What greater satisfaction is there, he asked, pretty sport to pull up two pence, six pence, and twelve pence as fast as you can let out a line? One hundred twenty-five years later another Virginia planter, William Byrd, would add to the fabled accounts of the place in his History of the Dividing Line, and it is significant that Thomas Jeffersons one book, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785, 1787), was written in response to inquiries made by a French naturalist concerning the geography and resources of his state. William Bartram, of Philadelphia, charmed both

Wordsworth and Coleridge with his travels though North and South Carolina in the 1770s. His descriptions of sun-filled pastures and awesome waterfalls convinced them that the landscape of our dreams is grounded on reality. European readers for three centuries were anxious to sort American fable from fact, but as Smiths Description convinced them, the facts themselves were fabulous.

THE PURITAN EXPERIMENT: PLYMOUTH PLANTATION Although those separatists from the Church of England whom we call Pilgrims were familiar with Captain Smiths Description and followed his map of the Atlantic coast, they were not sympathetic to his proposal that he join their

emigration to the New World; for Smith was primarily an adventurer, explorer,

and trader, and while this group was not composed enterily of reborn Christians (only about twenty-seven of the one hundred persons aboard the Mayflower were Puritans), and even those were not indifferent to the material well-being of their venture, their leaders had more in mind than mercantile success. These pilgrims thought of themselves as soldiers in a war against Satan-the Arch-Enemy-who planned to ruin the Kingdom of God on earth by sowing discord among those who professed to be Christians. This small band of believers saw no hope of reforming a national church and its Anglican hierarchy from within. In 1608, five years after the death of Queen Elizabeth and with an enemy of Puritanism, James Stuart, on the throne, they left Endland and settled in Holland, where, William Bradford tells us, they saw fair and beautiful cities and the grisly face of poverty confronting them. Isolated their language, and unable to farm, they turned to mastering trades(Bradford himself became a weaver). Later, fearing that they would eventually lose their identity as a religious community living as strangers in a foreign land, they applied for a charter to settle in the Virginia Plantation- a vast tract of land which included what is now New England. Sponsored who were anxious to receive repayment in goods from the New World, they sailed from Southampton, England, in September 1620. Sixty-six days later, taken by strong winds much farther north than they had anticipated, they dropped anchor at Cape Cod and established their colony at Plymouth. In spite of the fact that their separatism does not make them representative of the large number of emigrants who came to these shores in the seventeenth century(Plymouth was eventually absorbed into the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691 when a new charter was negotiated), their story has become an integral part of our literature. Bradfords account of a chosen people, exiles in a howling wilderness, who struggled against all adversity to bring into being the City of God on earth, is ingrained in our national consciousness. Both in the nineteenth century and in the twentieth, Americans have seen themselves as a redeemer nation, without, of course, possessing Bradfords Christian ideals. What gives Bradfords book its great strength, in spite of his of obvious prejudices, is his

ability to keep the ideals of the Pilgrims before us as he describes the harsh reality of their struggle against not only the external forces of nature but the even more damaging corruption of worldliness within the community. THE PURITAN EXPERIMENT: THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY Far more representative in attitude toward the Church of England were the Puritans who joined the Massachusetts Bay Colony under the leadership of John Winthrop. They were dissenting but non-separating although it might be argued the geographical distance from London, and charter which located the seat of their colony in Boston, left them non-separating in theory rather than practice. Whatever their difference with respect to the Church of England, however, the basic beliefs of both groups were identical: both held with Martin Luther that no pope or bishop had a right to impose any law upon a Christian soul without consent and, following John Calvin, that God chose freely those He would save and those He would damn eternally. Too much can be made of this doctrine of election; those who have not read the actual Puritan sermons often come away from secondary sources with the mistaken notion that Puritans talked about nothing but damnation. Puritans did indeed hold that God had chosen, before their birth, those whom He wished to save; but it does not follow that the Puritans considered most of us to be born damned. While Puritans argued that Adam broke the Covenant of Works (the promise God made obeyed Gods commandments) when he disobeyed and ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thereby bringing sin and death into the world, their central doctrine was new Covenant of Grace, a binding agreement Christ made with all men who believed in him, and which he sealed with his Crucifixion, promising them eternal life. Puritans thus addressed themselves not to the hopelessly unregenerate but to the indifferent, and they addressed the heart more often than the mind, always distinguishing between historical or rational understanding and heartfelt saving faith. There is more joy in Puritan life and thought than we often credit, and this joy is the direct result of meditation on the

doctrine of Christs redeeming power. Edward Taylor is not alone in making his rapturous litany of Christs attributes: He is altogether lovely in everything, lovely in His person, lovely in His natures, lovely in His properties, lovely in His offices, lovely in His titles, lovely in His practice, lovely in His purchases and lovely in His relations. All of Taylors art is a meditation on the miraculous gift of the Incarnation, and, in this respect, his sensibility is typically Puritan. Anne Bradstreet, who is remarkably frank about confessing her religious doubts, told her children that it was upon this rock Christ Jesus that she built her faith. Their lives, however, were hard. Anne Bradstreets father told people in England to come over and joint them if their lives were endued with grace, but that others were not fitted for this business; that there was not a house where one had not died, and that if they survived the terrible winter they had to face the devastating infections that were the result of summer heat. Bradfords account of what he called the starving time are among the most moving in his history, and nothing in Captain Smiths Discovery had hinted at how oppressive daily life might be. Sarah Kemble Knight of Boston and her Maryland counterpart Ebenezer Cooker provide healthy antidotes to any sentimental notion we might have that life on the frontier was invigorating. Puritan letters, diaries, histories, and poetry all attest to their faith in a larger plan, a noble design as Cotton Mather put it, which made daily the bearable. In this Christocentric world it is not surprising that Puritans held to the strictest requirements regarding communion, or, as they preferred to call it, the Lords Supper. It was the most important of the two sacraments they recognized (baptism being the other), and they guarded it with a zeal which set them apart from all other dissenting churches. In the beginning, communion was taken only by church (or relation) of their conversion and was regarded as a sign of election. This insistence on challenging their members made these New England churches more rigorous than any others, and confirmed the feeling that they were a special few. Thus, when John Winthrop addressed the immigrants to the Bay Colony aboard the flagship Arbella in 1630, he told them that the eyes of the

world were upon them, and that they would be an example for all, a city upon a hill. PURITAN HISTORIOGRAPHY Puritans held the writing of his history in high regard; for, as heirs of Renaissance thought, they believed that lasting truths were to be gained by studying the lives of noble men. Cotton Mather urged students of the ministry to read not only early church historians but the classical historians Xenophon, Livy, Tacitus, and Plutarch as well. Puritans saw all of human time as progression toward the fulfillment of Gods design on earth. Therefore, pre-Christian history could be read as a preparation for Christs entry into the world. They learned this lesson from medieval biblical scholars, who interpreted figures in the Old Testament as foreshadowings of Christ. This method of comparison, called typology, was an ingrained habit of Puritan thinking, and it made them compare themselves, as a chosen people, ton the Israelites of old, who had been given the promise of a new land. Cotton Mather said that John Winthrop was the Puritan Moses whose education had prepared him to fulfill the noble design of carrying a colony of chosen people into an American wilderness. Puritans believed that Gods hand was present in every human event and that he rewarded good and punished bad. History, therefore, revealed what God approved of or condemned, and if God looked favorably upon a nation, His approval could be evidenced in its success. Puritans had enough confidence in Gods design to believe that no facts were too small or insignificant to be included in that design; everything could emblemize something. In writing about Anne Bradstreet, Adrienne Rich observes that seventeenth-century Puritan life was perhaps the most selfconscious ever lived; that faith underwent its hourly testing, the domestic mundanities were episodes in the drama; the piecemeal thoughts of a woman stirring a pot, clues to her justification in Christ. John Winthrop in his diary records a struggle between a snake and a mouse and is surprised to see the seemingly weaker emerge the victor. His Boston friend, Mr.

Wilson, however, saw the event as a battle between Satan and a poor contemptible people, which God hath brought hither, which should overcome Satan here and disposes him of his kingdom. When a young sailor on board the Mayflower mocked those Puritans who were sick, Bradford found it fitting that the sailor should himself succumb to a grievous disease. This sense of the universal significance of all things meant that drama was present in every believers life and that individual lives could be as symbolic as the life of a nation. Mary Rowlandson, who had been captured by the Indians, saw her captivity as a lesson in the life of a representative soul who once wished to experience affliction and later experienced it only too well. Her Indian captors were, to her, more than uncivilized savages; they were devils incarnate. The greatest of all the Puritan historians was Cotton Mather, and in his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) the myth of a chosen people took an its fullest resonance of meaning. By the time Mather undertook his history, the original Puritan co9mmunity had vanished, leaving behind heirs to its lands and fortunes but not to its spiritually. Mather saw himself as one of the last defenders of the old New England way, and all the churches as under attack from nem forces of secularism. As a historian, Mather solved his problem by not focusing on the dissolution of the Puritan community but writing saints lives instead, each of which (like those of Eliot, Bradford, and Winthrop) would serve as an example of the progress of the individual Christian soul and an allegory of the potential American hero. Under Mathers artistry, Winthrops vision of a community of saints living in mutual concern and sympathy became an ideal rather than a historical reality. The words New England would symbolize the effort to realize the City of God on earth, and whether New England may live anywhere else or no. he said, it must live in our history.

AN EXPANDING UNIVERSE It should come as no surprise to learn that Cotton Mather was defensively retrospective in his ecclesiastical history of New England; for the enormous changes economic, social, philosophical, and scientific-which occurred between Mathers birth in 1663 and the publication of the Magnalia in 1702 incvitably affected the influence and authority of Congregational churches. In 1686 Mather himself joined with Boston merchants in jailing their colonial governor, Sir Edmund Andros, and was successful in getting him sent banck to England. It was a rare occasion when church and trade saw eye to eye; the Puritan clergy disliked Andross Anglicanism as much as the merchants hated his taxes. It was an act celebrated annually in Boston until it was replaced by celebrations honoring American independence. The increase in population alone would account for greater diversity of opinion in the matter of churches. In 1670, for example, the population of the colonies numbered approximately 111,000. Thirty years later the colonies contained more than a quarter of a million persons; by 1760, if one included Georgia, they numbered 1,600,000, and the settled area had tripled. The demand for and price of colonial goods increased in England, and vast fortunes were to be made in New England with any business connected with shipbuilding: especially timber, tar, and pitch. Virginia planters became rich in tobacco, and ricc and indigo from the Carolinas were in constant demand. New England towns were full of acrimonious debate between first settlers and newcomers. Town histories are full of accounts of splinter groups and the establishment of the Second church. In the beginning land was apportioned to settlers and allotted free, but by 1713 speculators in land were hard at work, buying as much as possible for as little as possible and selling high. The idea of a community of mutually helpful souls was fast disappearing. Life in the colonies was not easy, but the hardships and dangers the first settlers faced were mostly overcome, and compared to crowded cities like London, it was healthier, cheaper,

and more hopeful. Those who could arrange their passage came in great numbers. Boston almost doubled in size from 1700 to 1720. It is also important to note that the great emigration to America which occurred in the first half of the eighteenth century was not primarily English. Dutch and Germans came in large numbers and so did French Protestants. Jewish merchants and craftsmen were well known in New York and Philadelphia. By 1750 Philadelphia had became the unofficial capital of the colonies and was second only to London as a city of commerce. In 1681 the Quaker William Penn exchanged a large claim against the Crown for land in the New World. He was name proprietor (rather than governor, since he actually owned the territory) of Pennsylvania and in his Frame of Government told them that Liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without liberty is slavery. These thousands of emigrants did not think of themselves as displaced Englishmen; they thought of themselves as Americans. In 1702 no one would have dreamed of an independent union of colonies, but by 1752, fifty years later, it was a distinct possibility. THE ENLIGHTEMENT Great challenges to seventeenth-century beliefs were posed by scientists and philosophers, and it has sometimes been suggested that the modern period dates from 1662 and the founding of the British scientific academy known, because of the patronage of King Charles II, as the Royal Society. The greatest scientists of the age like Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and philosophers like John Locke (1632-1704) saw no conflict between their discoveries and traditionally held Christian truths. They saw nothing heretical in arguing that the universe was an orderly system and that by the application of reason mankind would comprehend its laws. But the inevitable result of their inquiries was to make the universe seem more rational and benevolent than it had been represented by Puritan doctrine. Because the world seemed more comprehensible, people paid less attention to revealed religion, and a number of seventeenth-century modes o thought

Bradford and Winthrops penchant for the allegorical and emblematic, seeing every natural and human event as a message from God, for instance seemed almost medieval and decidedly quaint. These new scientists and philosophers were called Deists; they deduced the existence of a Supreme Being from the construction of the universe itself rather than from the Bible. A creation, as one distinguished historian has put it, presupposes a creator. People were less interested in the metaphysical wit of introspective divines than in the progress of ordinary men as they made their way in the world. They assumed that men were naturally good, and dwelt on neither the Fall nor the Incarnation. A harmonious universe proclaimed the beneficence of God, and Deists argued that man himself should be as generous. They were not interested in theology but in mans own nature. Americans as well as Englishmen knew Alexander Popes famous couplet.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is man. Locke said that our business here on earth is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct. In suggesting that we are not born with a self of innate ideas of good or evil and that the mind is rather like a blank wax tablet upon which experiences are inscribed (a tabula rasa), Locke qualified traditional belief. THE GREAT AWAKENING A conservative reaction against the world view of the new science was bound to follow, and the first half of the eighteenth century witnessed a number of religious revivals in both England and America. They were sometimes desperate efforts to reassert the old values in the face of the new and, oddly enough, were themselves the direct product of the new cult of feeling, a philosophy which argued that mans greatest pleasure was derived from the good he did for others and that his sympathetic emotions (his joy as well as his tears) should not be contained.

Phillips Wheatley, whose poem on the death of the Methodist George Whitefield (1714-70) made her famous, said that Whitefield prayed that grace in the every heart might dwell, and longed to see America excel. Whitefields revival meetings along the Atlantic seaboard were a great personal triumph; but they were no more famous than the extraordinary circumstances which occurred in Northampton, Massachusetts, under the leadership of Jonathan Edwards in the 1730s and which have come to be synonymous with the Great Awakening. Edwards also read his Locke, but he wished to liberate human beings from their senses, not define them by those senses. Edwards was fond of pointing out that the five senses are what we share with beasts, and that if our ultimate goal were merely a heightened sensibility, feverish sickness is the condition where the senses are most acute. Edwards was interested in supernatural concerns, but he was himself influenced by Locke in arguing that true belief is something which we feel and do not merely comprehend intellectually. Edwards took the one doctrine most difficult for eighteenth-century minds to accept election-and persuaded his congregation the Gods sovereignty was not only the most reasonable doctrine, but that it was the most delightful, and appeared to him (using adjectives which suggest that the best analogy is to what can be apprehended sensually) exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet. In carefully reasoned calmly argued prose, as harmonious and as ordered as anything the age produced, Edwards brought his great intellect to bear on doctrines that had been current the century before. Most people, when they think about the Puritans, remember Edwards sermon Sinners In The Hand o f an Angry God, forgetting the one hundred years had lapsed between that sermon and Winthrops Model of Christian Charity. When tried to reassert the old New England way and demanded accounts of conversion before admission to church membership, he was accused of being a reactionary who thrived on hysteria, was removed from his pulpit, and was effectively silenced. He spent his last year as a missionary to the Indians in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a town forty miles to the west of Northampton. There he remained until invited to become president of the College

of New Jersey. His death in Princeton was the direct result of his willingness to be vaccinated against smallpox and so to set an example for his frightened and superstitious student; it serves as a vivid reminder of how complicated in any one individual the response to the new science could become. THE AMERICAN CRISIS On June 7, 1776, at the second Continental Congress, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia moved that these united colonies are, and of a right ought to be, free and independent states. A committee was duly appointed to prepare a declaration of independence, and it was approved on July 4. Although does mentions and then swiftness took some delegates by surprise- the purpose of the congress had, after all, not been to declare independence but protest the usurpation of rights by king and parliament and to effect a compromise with the mother country-others saw them as the inevitable consequence of the events of the decade preceding. The Stamp Act of 1764, taxing all newspapers, legal documents, and licenses, had infuriated Bostonians and resulted in the burning of the governors palace; in Virginia, Patrick Henry had taken the occasion to speak impassionedly against taxation without representation. In 1770 a Boston mob had been fired upon by British soldiers, and these years later the famous Tea Party occurred, an act h which drew hard lines in the matter of acceptable limits of British in Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts, was still on everyones tongue in Philadelphia when the second Continental Congress convened in May of 1775. Although drama of these events cannot be underestimates, most historians agree that it was Thomas Paines common senses , published in January 1776, that gave the needed push for revolution. In the course of two months it was read by almost every American. In arguing that separation from England was the only reasonable course that the Almighty had planted these feelings in us for good and wise purposes, Paine was appealing to basic tenets of the enlightenment. His clarion call to those that love mankind, those that are dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! did not got unheeded. Americans needed an

apologist for the Revolution, and in December 1776, when Washingtons troops were at their most demoralized, it was, again, Paines first Crisis paper popularly called the American Crisis - which was read to all the regiments and was said to have inspired their future success. Paine first came to America in 1774 with a note from Benjamin Franklin recommending him to publishers and editors. He was only one of a number of young writers who were able to take advantage of the times. This was, in fact, the great age of the newspaper and the moral essay; Franklin tells us that he modeled his own style on the clarity, good sense, and simplicity of the English essayists Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. The first newspaper in the colonies appeared in 1704, but by the time of the Revolution there were almost fifty papers and forty magazines. The great cry was for a national literature (meaning anti-British), and the political events of the 1770s were advantageous for a career. Philip Freneau made his first success as a writer as a satirist of the British, and after the publication of his Poems Written Chiefly during the Late War (1786) he turned to newspaper work, editing the New York Daily Advertiser and writing antiFederalist party essays, making himself an enemy of Alexander Hamilton in the process. The most distinguished political writings of the period are, in fact, the essays Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison wrote for New York newspapers in 1787 and 1788 and collectively known as The Federalist Papers. In attempting to get New Yorkers to support the new Constitution they provided an eloquent defense of the framework of the Republic. Joel Barlow also published anti-British satires in the New Haven Gazette and Connecticut Magazine, and envisioned an American literature which would extol our government, our educational institutions, and the arts. He spent most of his life revising a long hymn to the Republic called The Columbiad. But Barlow never settled down to the life of the artist; he was too much the entrepreneur and world traveler for that. His best poems are not his philosophical epics but poems, like The Hasty Pudding, in praise of the simple life. Freneaus career was also marked by restlessness and indecision, although in his case financial necessity came between his life and his

art. The first American writer able to live exclusively by his craft was Washington Irving. The crisis in American life caused by the Revolution made artists selfconscious about American subjects. It would be another fifty years before writers discovered way of being American without compromising their integrity, one of the ironies of our history is that the Revolution itself has rarely proved to be a usable subject for American literature and art. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS When John Winthrop described his model for a Christian community, he envisioned a group of men and women working together for the common good, each one of whom knew his or her place in the social structure and accepted Gods disposition of goods. At all times, he said, some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, others low and in subjection. Ideally, it was to be a community of love, all made equal by their fallen nature and their concern for the salvation of their souls; but it was to be a stable community, and Winthrop would not have imagined very much social change. One hundred forty years later John Adams, our second president, envisioned a model community, decreed by higher laws, when he said that the American colonies were a part of a grand scheme and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth. Adams witnessed social mobility of a kind and an extent, however, that no European before him would have dreamed possible. As historians have observed, European critics of America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries never understood that great social change was possible without social upheaval primarily because there was no feudal hierarchy to overthrow. When Crevecoeur wanted to distinguish America from Europe, it was the medievalism of the latter that he wished to stress. The visitor to America, he said, views not the hostile castle, and the haughty mansion, contrasted with the clay-built hut and miserable

cabin, where cattle and men help to keep each other warm, and dwell in meanness, smoke and indigence. Of course, not everyone was free. Some of our founding fathers, like Thomas Jefferson, were large slaveowners, and it was still not possible to vote without owning property. Women had hardly any rights at all: they could not vote, and young women were educated at home, excluded by their studies from anything other than domestic employment. Nevertheless, the same forces that were undermining church authority in New England (in New York and Philadelphia no such hierarchy existed) were effecting social change. The two assumptions held to be true by most eighteenth-century Americans were, as Russel Nye once put it, the perfectability of man, and the prospect of his future progress. Much of the imaginative energy of the second half of the eighteenth century was expanded in correcting institutional injustices: the tyranny of monarchy, the tolerance of slavery, the misuse of prisons. Few doubted that with the application of intelligence the human lot could be improved; and writers like Freneau, Franklin, and Crevecoeur argued that, if it were not too late, the white man might learn something about brotherhood and manners from nobles savages rather than from rude white settlers, slave-owners, and backwoodsmen. In many ways it is Franklin who best represents the spirit of the Enlightenment in America: self-educated, social, assured, a man of the world, ambitious and public-spirited, speculative about the nature of the universe, but in matters of religion content to observe the actual conduct of men rather than to debate supernatural matters which are improvable. When Ezra Stiles asked him about his religion, he said he believed in the creator of the universe but he doubted the divinity of Jesus. He would never dogmatize about it, however, because he expected soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. Franklin always presents himself as a man depending on firsthand experience, too worldly-wise to be caught off guard. His posture, however, belies one side of the eighteenth century which can be accounted for neither by the inheritance of Calvin nor by the empiricism of Locke: those idealistic assumptions which

underlie the great public documents of the American Revolution, especially the Declaration of Independence. These are truths which, Joel Barlow once said, were as perceptible when first presented to the mind as age or world of experience could make them. Given the representative nature of Franklins character, it seems right that of the documents most closely associated with the formation of the American Republic the Declaration of Independence, the treaty of alliance with France, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution only he should have signed all four. The fact that Americans in the last quarter of the eighteenth century would hold that certain truths are self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness is the result, as both Leon Howard and Gary Wills have argued, of their reading the Scottish philosophers, particularly Francis Hutcheson and Lord Kames (Henry Home), who argued that all men in all places possess a sense common to all a moral sense which contradicted the notion of the mind as an empty vessel awaiting experience. This idealism paved the way for writers like Bryant, Thoreau, and Whitman, but in the 1770s its presence is found chiefly in politics and ethics. The assurance of a universal sense of right and wrong made possible both the overthrow of tyrants and the restoration of order; and it allowed men to make new earthly covenants, not, as was the case with Bradford and Winthrop, for the glory of God, but, as Thomas Jefferson argued, for mans right to happiness on earth.

JOHN SMITH 1580-1631 By the time John Smith was nineteen years old he had left his familys Lincolnshire farm and the life of a shopkeepers apprentice behind him for the high seas and a life of adventure. From 1601 to 1605 he served as mercenary and fought the Turks in the Balkans, and it was there that he was captured and sold

into slavery. He escaped by murdering his owner and fled to safety in Poland, where Prince Sigismund Bathori signed documents testifying to Smiths heroism and helped him to return to England by way of Germany, France, Spain, and Morocco. After his return to London he seems to have had no further interest in Europe and turned all his attention instead to a new obsession: America. In 1606 the London Trading Company received a patent from the Crown encouraging the colonization of America. Although one of the companys avowed aims was the dissemination of Christianity in the New World, the primary impulse behind their explorations was more materialist than religious. The first ship set sail for Virginia on December 3, 1606, with one hundred and forty-four persons aboard. Captain John Smith was among them. They entered Chesapeake Bay four months later. Thirty-nine people had died on the voyage and their troubles were just beginning. The London Company knew almost nothing about the region they had encouraged these emigrants to settle and instructions on how they were to govern themselves were not revealed to them until they opened letters sealed until their arrival. For the first year they were to be ruled by a council of seven men. Smiths name was listed as one of the seven, but because he had been charged with mutiny on the voyage over, he was excluded from the governing body until June of 1607. Shortly after the ships which brought them to Virginia returned to London, the settlers were ravaged by disease and saw their number dwindle daily. From the beginning, Smith seems to have understood better than anyone else that their first priority was immediate survival and not the possibility that they might find gold. Although he was excluded from office, he was allowed to explore the surrounding countryside and search for food. It was one of his first explorations that the was captured by Indians and condemned to death. Whether or not Smith was actually saved by the intervention of the beautiful daughter of Chief Powhatan we will never know. Smiths first account of his adventure appeared in a letter he wrote to a friend in England and published under the title of A True Relation (1608), and no mention is made there of Pocohontas. But sixteen years later Smith retold the tale of his close call with death in The General History

(1624) and from that time to the present his name and hers have been inextricably paired. True or not, this tale of redemption from captivity by the intercession of a child of nature caught the imagination of Smiths readers in a way that the actual grim details of the life led at Jamestown did not. It is ironic that Smith was imprisoned upon his return and charged with the loss of two men. He was only saved from hanging by the arrival of ships from England bringing much-needed supplies. After the summer of 1608 and the second epidemic of malaria (forty-five out of ninety-five men died), it was clear to all that, whatever his faults, John Smith knew more about wilderness survival than any of them and that if they were to endure it would have to be under his command. Smith was elected president of the council in the autumn of 1608 and later, governor. The winter of 1608 would have been their last had Smith not been able to bargain successfully with the Indians for corn. In October 1609, however, he was forced to return to England for medical care, having been seriously wounded in a gunpowder explosion. Smith never returned to Jamestown, but five years later he embarked for the shores of America, and in April 1614 arrived at what is now the Maine coast. Had he spent a winter in Maine and Massachusetts he might have returned with a more-qualified view toward settlement there, but, instead, he left for England in August, determined to encourage further exploration of the territory he called New England. Smith made a number of attempts to reach these shores again, but pirates, the weather, and money all prevented him one time or another. He was so determined to return that in spite of the fact that he had no sympathy with the Puritans he offered to lead the Leyden contingent on their crossing in 1620. These Pilgrims rejected his offer, but were grateful for the use of his maps. Necessity transformed John Smith from an adventurer into a writer, but in his New England Trials (1620), The General History of Virginia (1624), and Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England (1631) he always

had one eye focused on a last expedition to America led by himself. Sadly for him, it was never to take place, but the great migrations to Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s prove that his work did not fall on deaf cars. John Winthrop aboard the Arbella would certainly have looked with favor on Smiths observation in A Description of New England (1616) that nothing is more honorable than the discovery of things unknown: erecting towns, peopling countries, informing the ignorant, reforming things unjust, teaching virtue, and [making a gain] to our native mother country.