Newport, and arrange to sail with him for Virginia.
It is not remarkable that a man tried by such experiences should, from the first, have taken a prominent part in the enterprise. An unwelcome part in the beginning, for scarcely had the voyage begun, when he was accused of plotting mutiny, arrested and kept in irons until the ships reached Virginia. Late in April, the fleet entered Hampton Roads, and proceeding up the river, which was forthwith named the James, came at last on May 13th, to a low peninsula which seemed suited for a settlement. The next day they set to work building a fort, which they called Fort James, but the settlement soon came to be known as Jamestown.
Once the fort was finished, Captain Newport sailed back to England for supplies, and the little settlement was soon in desperate straits for food. Within three months, half of the colonists were in their graves, and bitter feuds arose among the survivors. These were for the most part "gentlemen adventurers," who had accompanied the expedition in the hope of finding gold, and who were wholly unfitted to cope with the conditions in which they found themselves. Of all of them, Smith was by far the most competent, and he did valiant service in trading with the Indians for corn and in conducting a number of expeditions in search of game.
It was while on one of these, in December, 1607, that that incident of his career occurred which is all that a great many people know of Captain John Smith. With two companions, he was paddling in a canoe up the Chickahominy, when the party was attacked by Indians. Smith's two companions were killed, and he himself saved his life only by exhibiting his compass and doing other things to astonish and impress the savages.
He was finally taken captive to the Powhatan, the ruler of the tribe, and, according to Smith's story, a long debate ensued among the Indians as to his fate. Presently two large stones were laid before the chief, and Smith was dragged to them and his head forced down upon them, but even as one of the warriors raised his club to dash out the captive's brains, the Powhatan's daughter, a child of thirteen named Pocahontas, threw herself upon him, shielding his head with hers, and claimed him for her own, after the Indian custom. Smith was thereupon released, adopted into the tribe, and sent back to Jamestown, where he arrived on the eighth of January, 1608.
From the Indian standpoint, there was nothing especially unusual about this procedure, for any member of the tribe was privileged to claim a captive, if he wished. A century before, Ortiz, a member of De Soto's expedition, had been captured by the Indians and saved in precisely the same way, and many instances of the kind occurred in the years which followed. But to the captive, it partook of the very essence of romance; he had only the dimmest idea of what was really happening, and his account of it, written many years later, was of the most sentimental kind. Many doubts have been cast on the story, and historians seem hopelessly divided about it, as they are about many other incidents of Smith's life. Certain it is, however, that Pocahontas afterwards befriended the colony on more than one occasion; and was finally converted, married to a planter named John Rolfe, and taken to England, where, among the artificialities of court life, she soon sickened and died.
On the very day that Smith reached Jamestown with his Indian escort, the supply ship sent out by Captain Newport also arrived, bringing 120 new colonists. Of the original 105, only thirty-eight were left alive. But Smith's enemies were yet in the ascendancy, and he spent the summer of 1608 in exploration, leaving the colony to its own devices. When he returned to it in September, he found it reduced and disheartened. His brave and cheery presence acted as a tonic, and at last the colonists, appreciating him at his true value, elected him president. He put new life into everyone, and when, soon afterwards, Newport arrived again from England with fresh supplies, he found the colony in fairly good shape.
But the members of the Virginia Company were growing impatient at the failure of the venture to bring any returns, and they sent out instructions by Newport demanding that either a lump of gold be sent back to England or that the way to the South Sea be discovered. Smith said plainly that the instructions were ridiculous, and wrote an answer to them in blunt soldier English. Then, turning his hand in earnest to the government of the disorderly rabble under him, he instituted an iron discipline, whipped the laggards into line, and by the end of April had some twenty houses built, thirty or forty acres of ground broken up and planted, nets and weirs arranged for fishing, a new fortress under way, and various small manufactures begun. A great handicap was the system, by which all property was held in common, so that the drones shared equally with the workers, but Smith took care that there should be few drones. There can be no doubt that his sheer will power kept the colony together, but his credit with the company was undermined by enemies in England, nor did his own blunt letter help matters. The company was re-organized on a larger scale, a new governor appointed, new colonists started on the way; and, finally, in 1609, Smith was so seriously wounded by the explosion of a bag of gun-powder, that he gave up the struggle and returned to England.
Instant disaster followed. When he left the colony, it numbered five hundred souls; when the next supply ship reached it in May, 1610, it consisted of sixty scarecrows, mere wrecks of human beings. The rest had starved to death—or been eaten by their companions! There was a hasty consultation, and it was decided that Virginia must be abandoned. On Thursday, June 7, 1610, the cabins were stripped of such things as were of value, and the whole company went on shipboard and started down the river—only to meet, next day, in Hampton Roads, a new expedition headed by the new governor, Lord Delaware, himself! By this slight thread of coincidence was the fate of Virginia determined.
The ship put about at once, and on the following Sunday morning, Lord Delaware stepped ashore at Jamestown, and, falling to his knees, thanked God that he had been in time to save Virginia. He proceeded at once to place the colony upon a new and sounder basis, and it was never again in danger of extinction, though Jamestown itself was finally abandoned as unsuited to a settlement on account of its malarious atmosphere. But Virginia itself grew apace into one of the greatest of England's colonies in America.
John Smith himself never returned to Virginia. In 1614, he explored the coast south of the Penobscot, giving it the name it still bears, New England. A year later, while on another expedition, he was captured by the French and forced to serve against the Spaniards. Broken in health and fortune, he spent his remaining years in London, dying there in 1631. There is a portrait of him, showing him as a handsome, bearded man, with nose and mouth bespeaking will and spirit—just such a man as one would imagine this gallant soldier of fortune to have been.
While the English, under the guiding hand of John Smith, were fighting desperately to maintain themselves upon the James, the French were struggling to the same purpose and no less desperately along the St. Lawrence. We have seen how Jacques Cartier explored and named that region, but civil and religious wars in France put an end to plans of colonization for half a century, and it was not until 1603 that Samuel Champlain, the founder of New France, and one of the noblest characters in American history, embarked for the New World.
Samuel Champlain was born at Brouage about 1567, the son of a sea-faring father, and his early years were spent upon the sea. He served in the army of the Fourth Henry, and after the peace with Spain, made a voyage to Mexico. Upon his return to France in 1603, he found a fleet preparing to sail to Canada, and at once joined it. Some explorations were made of the St. Lawrence, but the fleet returned to France within the year, without accomplishing anything in the way of colonization. Another expedition in the following year saw the founding of Port Royal, while Champlain made a careful exploration of the New England coast, but he found nothing that attracted him as did the mighty river to the north. Thither, in 1608, he went, and sailing up the river to a point where a mighty promontory rears its head, disembarked and erected the first rude huts of the city which he called by the Indian name of Quebec, or "The Narrows." A wooden wall was built, mounting a few small cannon and loopholed for musketry, and the conquest of Canada had begun. A magnificent cargo of furs was dispatched to France, and Champlain and twenty-eight men were left to winter at Quebec. When spring came, only nine were left alive, but reinforcements and supplies soon arrived, and Champlain arranged to proceed into the interior and explore the country.
The
