Origins

John Smith, the son of George and Alice (Rickard) Smith, was baptized on January 9, 1580, in Willoughby by Alford, Lincolnshire, England. His parents were yeomanry. 

Apprenticeship and Military Beginnings

After primary schooling, he was apprenticed to a merchant, became dissatisfied and after his father’s death in 1596 left albeit on good terms.

Within a year he was serving in the wars in the Netherlands, traveling into France, on a mission by sea to Scotland, always in close association with Peregrine Bertie, son of his father’s landlord, Lord Willoughby.

At age 18 or 19 he tells us he lived in the woods as a hermit on the Bertie estate to study Marcus Aurelius and Niccolò Machiavelli for the lessons of the stoic and the art of war, a period that included lengthy training in horsemanship by the Berties’ equerry. 

Campaigns

Again on the continent, he determined to follow the profession of arms. Seeing no calling in fights between Christians, he sought to join the Austrian forces halting the Turkish advance across central Europe. His route was devious. After several adventures, mishaps, and encounters in France, he took passage on a merchant ship that cruised the length of the Mediterranean and staged a piratical attack on a Venetian trader. He came ashore in Italy with pockets full and toured there before going north at last to enlist in the armies of the Emperor Rudolph (1601).

He served with distinction in several battles in Hungary, was promoted to captain of horse, then major, and received a coat of arms.

He was wounded in a skirmish, captured, sold into slavery, taken to Constantinople, removed from there to be a field hand in southern Russia (1603).

Return

He used his first opportunity to kill his slavemaster and flee across Russia and Poland, back into Hungary, only to find there the fighting had ended. He wandered over Europe, south briefly to Morocco. He was caught up in privateering in the Atlantic islands, found no chance for soldiering, and was back in England (1604-05).

Jamestown and New England

He joined the London Company-sponsored Jamestown expedition as one of its officers, was on the first voyage to Virginia, a member of the first council (1607-08), served as quartermaster in charge of trading with the Indians for food. He explored and mapped the Chesapeake Bay, became notorious as president of the council for ordaining “who does not work shall not eat,” but is better known for bringing about a drastic reduction in the colony’s death toll. After a near-fatal accident, he returned to England in the fall of 1609 to write and edit a description and history of the new colony.

In 1614, he recrossed the Atlantic to map the coast of northern New England, a name he bestowed. It signaled a turn. His main effort shifted to spurring and promoting New England colonization.

He attempted a voyage to plant a settlement there the following year. It was cut short by French pirates and Smith again found himself a captive. During a storm, he escaped in a skiff, survived, and returned to England. It was to be his last effort at an active role in colonial affairs. He spent the rest of his life on dry land writing books.

Death and Legacy

He lived in London among friends and died on June 21, 1631, poor, unmarried, without descendants.

Smith has become a hero and like all heroes presents a big target. Fair to say his account can be demonstrated to contain errors, it cannot be demonstrated to contain lies. If he exaggerates, we do not see him falsify. Smith tells us his story is of one too often overlooked, unrewarded, misrepresented. He was that rare and singular individual: a man of many words with deeds to match. Of course, his account is one sided, but his hunches were good, his instincts true, his advice proved sound. History has indeed been on his side.

We don’t see much modesty unless to see a man of integrity living in a ruthless age. He was a self-made man in a world governed by birth, privilege, preferment, and frank bribery.

He rose from little to the highest councils by dint of brains and good sense, along with courage, energy, indomitable resource, and in time, forceful writing, but with few if any Elizabethan social skills (he did not always remove his cap when talking to authority).

His declared motto was “life’s about winning,” but another might well have been “get it done, damn the torpedoes!” Those who governed Virginia before 1610 relied on him for the second motto. Those after 1610 and those who settled New England after 1620 gladly took his advice as long as they did not have to have him around.

The Man

Everybody who reads Smith’s vivid prose wants to give him a vivid personality: bold, assertive, quick and decisive, loud and outspoken, but never cruel, often kind, a shrewd trader with a generous streak, accused by his peers, vouched for by his men.

We have no doubt he was a born soldier with a sense of physical invincibility, was fond of ruse, feint, bluff, the cunning dodge as opposed to “going straight at ’em.” He was a perfectionist and fussed over detail like a true intellectual. He had the autodidact’s zeal to teach anything and everything as soon as he had taught himself. He could not suffer fools and relished verbal combat as much as physical. This got him in enough trouble to sour his chances for upward mobility. Sheer talent goes only so far. That and a lack of venality: He did not grow rich in office when he had one.

Let those who served under him at Jamestown have the last word: “What shall I say but thus we left him that in all his proceedings made justice his first guide and experience his second, even hating baseness, sloth, pride, and indignity more than any dangers, that never allowed any more for himself than his soldiers with him, that upon no danger would send them where he would not lead himself, that would never see us want what he either had or could by any means get us; that would rather want than borrow, or starve than not pay, that loved action more than words, and hated falsehood and covetousness worse than death, whose adventures were our lives, and whose loss our deaths.” (The Proceedings, p. 101, by Richard Pots, W[illiam] P[hettiplace] et al.)

Additional Reading

Two excellent book-length biographies are Captain John Smith: His Life and Legend, by Bradford Smith (1953); The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith, by Philip L. Barbour (1964); and The American Dream of Captain John Smith, by J. A. Leo Lemay (1991). Barbour’s article “John Smith” in the Encyclopedia Americana, Vol. 25, is an excellent brief.