Quotes from Smith’s Writings

Humor & Sarcasm 

Gentlemen in silks

“And now the winter approaching, the rivers became so covered with swans, geese, ducks, and cranes that we daily feasted with good bread, Virginia peas, pumpions, and putchamins, fish, fowl, and divers sorts of wild beasts as fat as we could eat them, so that none of our tuftaffaty humorists desired to [bolt] for England.” (The Generall Historie, 3, p. 46) 

Gold Fever at Jamestown

But the worst mischief was our gilded refiners with their golden promises made all men their slaves in hope of recompenses. There was no talk, no hope, no work but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, load gold—such a bruit of GOLD that one mad fellow desired to be buried in the sands, lest they should by their art make gold of his bones. Little need there was and less reason the ship should stay, their wages run on, our victual consume 14 weeks, that the mariners might say they did help to build such a golden church that we can say the rain washed near to nothing in 14 days. (The Generall Historie, 3, p. 53). 

Till then we never accounted Captain Newport a refiner [of gold], who being fit to set sail for England and we not having any use of parliaments, plays, petitions, admirals, recorders, interpreters, chronologers, courts of plea, nor justices of peace, sent Master Wingfield and Captain Archer with him for England to seek some place of better employment. (Proceedings, p. 22)

Fishing in the Potomac River

“We found … abundance of fish lying so thick with their heads above the water as for want of nets (our barge driving amongst them) we attempted to catch them with a frying pan, but we found it a bad instrument to catch fish with: Neither better fish, more plenty, nor more variety for small fish had any of us ever seen in any place so swimming in the water than in the Bay of Chesapeack, but they are not to be caught with frying pans.” (The Generall Historie, 3, p. 58)

As for Newport’s proposed voyage to Monacan

“For the charge of this voyage of two or three thousand pounds we have not received the value of an hundred pounds! And for the quart’red boat to be borne … over the Falls, if he had burnt her to ashes, one might have carried her in a bag.” (The Generall Historie, 3, p. 71) 

The Starving Time

So great was our famine that … one amongst the rest did kill his wife, powdered [salted] her, and had eaten part of her before it was known—for which he was executed, as he well deserved. Now whether she was better roasted, boiled, or carbonado’d I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of. (The Generall Historie, 4, p. 105-106) 

Survival Skills

Now although there be deer in the woods, fish in the rivers, and fowls in abundance in their seasons, yet the woods are so wide, the rivers so broad, and the beasts so wild, and we so unskillful to catch them, we little troubled them nor they us. (Advertisements, p. 6) 

On the way to Jamestown, 1607

Such factions here [on the island of Nevis] we had as commonly attend such voyages that a pair of gallows was made. But Captain Smith, for whom they were intended, could not be persuaded to use them.” And yet further: “But [yet] not one of the inventers but their lives by justice fell into his power to determine of at his pleasure whom with much mercy he favored that most basely and unjustly would have betrayed him. (True Travels, p. 57)