And what now of Smith in England? Neither in Plymouth nor in London did
he succeed in getting backers to send him to New England although the
Pilgrims studied his maps and books. He wanted to go along with them but
he was considered too expensive and too headstrong a companion for such
stern settlers. Again he poured out his enthusiasm into another book,
for only his pen could keep busy, but that, like his tongue, was no
lagger. The man himself remained unemployed and unimportant, for his
betters had no idea of letting worth be as recognized as birth. What had
he got for exploring and advising for New England?
He began to brood about what Virginia owed him for his risks and
services. Land had been the only wages of the London Company and he was
not in Virginia to stake his claims. In May 1621 he appealed to the
company court and reminded them that he had risked money and peril of
his life for the good of the Plantation. He had built up Jamestown, and
had given five years of his life at great risk to establish Virginia,
and he had spent five hundred pounds of his scant estate in the effort.
Surely now he deserved remuneration either from the local treasury or
from the general Virginia profit in England--but he got none. The London
Company's affairs were not in good shape in either place and the
massacre of 1622 made them worse. Incensed at this latest blow to his
colony, Smith rashly volunteered to rush to their aid with a small army.
In all of his far-flung adventures there was nothing so satisfying to
him as this colony which he had founded. Raleigh had named Virginia,
while he had named New England, but Virginia was his first love, and he
much preferred her sporting planters and adventurers to the pious and
thrifty townsmen of New England. If there was a woman in his life, it
was Virginia--not Pocahontas nor any other. Virginia had never got out
of his blood. He dreamed of cementing the two coasts on one map, but
this, like his every proposition, was turned down.
Rebuffed, he brought out a revised edition of his _New England's
Trials_, and expressed his love of the American outpost eloquently, "I
may call them my children for they have been my wife, hawks, my hounds,
my dice and in total my best content, as indifferent to my heart as my
left hand to my right." As a patroness for his handsome book _The
General Historie_ in 1624, the Duchess of Richmond came to his aid.
Smith had important male backers of his literary works now, if not of
explorations. When he wrote the _Seaman's Grammar_ in 1629, Sir Samuel
Saltonstall was the backer. Among his friends was a collector and
scientist whose house was called "Tradescant's Ark." If he had not been
close to Smith how could his collection include Powhatan's discarded
robe, Indian combs, rattles, bows and arrows, feathered crowns and
tobacco pipes? Smith even willed him a fourth of his library.
Smith's _True Travels_ appeared in 1629, and the incredible tale of his
adventures read well to Londoners who were disturbed with financial
depression and with the plague besides.
In order to escape the plague Smith spent much time in the country near
Essex in the hospitable home of Sir Humphrey Mildmay. Mildmay dubbed his
wife "the old woman," and he often escaped his family with the
boisterous and masculine Smith to roam his fields, to hunt, fish, dice
and drink. His six children delighted in their tarrying visitor, but
Smith often eluded the happy and hearty family to write history in his
own room. The huge home had wings, and it was set in a shady grove from
which he could see London, thirty miles away, on clear days. He did not
tarry there indefinitely being sometimes impatient for London itself
where he also had a room in Saltonstall's house.
Yes, he had patronizing friends, but he was alone in his frustrated
hopes. He had been so far and done so much as a leader of men whether
they admitted it or not, and as such he was a being apart. He had been
so as an adolescent who had lost his father by death, his mother by
marriage, who had quit school and master as well as home. As an adult he
had left country, colony and yet another colony, and when he wanted them
back they had not wanted him. Finally, he was lonely because he had
risen above his class in society without ever feeling secure among his
betters in spite of their hospitality to an entertaining explorer and
literary notable. Smith was ever without a home of his own, if never
without a hope.
As time went on while the hands of benevolent ladies helped him over
hurdles, men were usually the ones beside him, if not back of him. He
could visit for months at a time as at the Mildmay's or for years as at
Saltonstall's.
It was at the latter house that he died suddenly at the age of
fifty-one. He had made arrangements for a dignified burial, knowing that
others would not make it what it should be--before history inevitably
brought him into his own. Where Shakespeare willed arms, he, Smith, the
hero of legends as well as the author of them, willed books--of which he
had written many and read more. An epitaph in brass extolled his feats:
the victory over the three Turks; and the claim, that he had "dispersed
the heathen like smoke" and made their land "a habitation for a
Christian nation." Because he was buried there, St. Sepulchre's would
become a shrine even as St. George's has.
* * * * *
Regardless of the fact that Pocahontas married John Rolfe, the public
unites her name rather with that of Smith. The three make up an integral
triangle. Each lived briefly, but intensely, Pocahontas passing first in
the springtime of her life. Rolfe had wanted to take care of her, giving
her protection, and glory in both of their countries, and proud
descendants. He was more than just her husband. The poet Stephen Vincent
Benet puts it:
"You may think of him as Pocahontas' husband,
He was rather more than that and his seed still lives,
And we would do well to fence the small plot of garden,
Where, in hose and doublet, he planted the Indian weed."[1]
For all of his practical ability, fate allowed him neither to take care
of her nor of himself. He met violent death at the hands of her people,
dying in her country just as she had gone first in his, for neither was
able to survive an alien way of life.
Although Smith adventured valiantly for God, and Rolfe persuaded himself
that he had married the Indian maid to save her soul more than her
heart, Pocahontas, the purer spirit, transcends both.
The spirit of Pocahontas broods yet on her own side of the great salt
waters. Her dust rests out of place at St. George's Church on the
Thames, even if it is named the "Chapel of Unity" for all faiths,
because of her peaceable heart.
"Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or
a paw-paw in May ..." mused the poet Carl Sandburg. "Did she wonder?
Does she remember ... in the dust, in the cool tombs?"[2] She lives,
believed the poet Vachel Lindsay, in the waving corn, and in her
spiritual descendants, the American people. She lives still in the blood
of some Americans, but for longer in her poignant tale, whose true red
hue has not paled through the years.
_Historical Background_
The story of the rescue of America's prime folk-hero, John Smith, by
Pocahontas, America's most appealing heroine, fills such a patriotic
need that it would have been fabricated had it been untrue. It passed
for sure history for two hundred and thirty-six years, except for the
feeble denial of Thomas Fuller in his _Worthies of England_.[1] Smith
held his own word to be the first and last about history and himself.
Yet now the howling squabble over his merits, never hushed in his time,
flairs again after three centuries.
In 1860 Charles Deane of Massachusetts asked why Smith had concealed the
story for sixteen years.[2] Henry Adams, while he bowed to Pocahontas as
the most romantic figure in American history, and as the visiting
celebrity of 1616 in England, stepped up to Deane's standard,[3] as did
William Cullen Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay,[4] and the Southern
scholar, Alexander Brown.[5]
But William Wirt Henry,[6] Mrs. Mary Newton Stanard,[7] and Lyon G.
Tyler[8] remained fast friends of the cherished tale. Edward Arber, the
most careful editor of Smith's work, accepts it.[9] John Fiske points
out that the printed text of the _True Relation_ was incomplete for
Smith had written much which his editor in London omitted as "fit to be
printed."[10] Allan Nevins, in _The Gateway to History_, suggests that
Smith may have told the story in 1608.[11] Mrs. Stanard[12] and William
Wirt Henry[13] also stress this fact. Edward Channing assails the
story[14] but Charles M. Andrews accepts it.[15] Many more writers
contend that Smith may have deliberately kept the story dark in order
that possible new colonists might not be frightened. The tale was not
denied when it was told to Smith's contemporaries in 1624.
Many public school teachers have taken the middle ground that the story
is almost indispensable and is probably true. Bradford Smith, whose
biography of Captain John Smith is notable among a score on the subject,
declares that there is not a scrap of evidence to disprove the
narrative, and many reasons to establish it.[16] Without the story it
would be hard to explain why Powhatan spared Smith since, according to
Smith, two Indians had been killed.[17] It was customary for a chief's
daughter to be allowed the life of a favorite captive. Juan Ortiz had
been saved twice in this manner near Tampa, Florida, nearly a century
before.
While Smith is considered a boastful liar by Alexander Brown and others,
he still has not only reluctant admirers but fervent defenders among
historians. Matthew Page Andrews admitted: "Than Smith there has been
no more daring adventurer in English history."[18] Say Henry Steele
Commager and Allan Nevins in _The Heritage of America_, a source history
for Virginia's high schools: "He was a figure worthy of the English race
which found in him the first great American representative.... Smith was
worth all the others put together."[19]
The public has been inclined to couple the Indian maiden's name with
that of John Smith, more than with that of John Rolfe. But this present
author's point that Pocahontas did not know that Smith was still alive
when she married Rolfe, and that she was still in love with Smith, is
unusual. However, it is not original. It has been taken in some plays
and short stories. William Wirt Henry's address before the Virginia
Historical Society in 1882 and Samuel Purchas's _Pilgrimage_[20] suggest
that Smith could have married her had he so desired. This book is
presented as a probable story rather than as documented history.
THE POCAHONTAS-JOHN SMITH STORY is most stoutly defended not by
historians, nor even patriotic societies, but by poets, dramatists, and
idealistic youth, who think that it is theirs, and by descendants, who
know that it is theirs. The line is utterly Virginian be it in blood or
ink from the Pocahontas, who like Will Rogers's ancestors "met the boat"
to the Pocahontas who wrote the book. And so I sign here