How it All Started

The Sultana shallop (Photo: Chris Cerino)

It grew out of a conversation I had with Pat Noonan.

Pat when I met him a was former head of the Nature Conservancy and was now heading up a new organization, The Conservation Fund, and on advisory boards of the National Geographic and the National Park Service.

Smith was one of Pat’s heroes. His passion was to see a John Smith “water trail” become a national park and have a recreation “barge of discovery” built in Chestertown, Md. to reenact Smith’s voyages of exploration during the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown in 2007.

We were standing together in Elk Neck State Park watching the Chestertown crew take a bucksaw and drop a lovely, straight white oak to be the keel, when Pat turned to me and said he wanted me to write a biography of Smith.

Pat was always handing out assignments left and right. It was my turn.

My response was that Philip Barbour’s was quite adequate, in no need of improvement, but how about locating and replacing all those crosses surrounding the Chesapeake Bay on his 1612 map?

Pat loved it, jumped on it, gave me my marching orders. The day I met the man, I had already become one of his soldiers.

It was November 20, 2004. That also serves as a good date for when I began assemble the parts of the book that became John Smith in the Chesapeake. So Pat got some biography after all.