Captain John Smith was one of the most insightful and colorful writers to visit America in the colonial period. While his first venture was in Virginia, some of his most important work concerned New England and the colonial enterprise as a whole. The publication in 1986 of Philip Barbour's three-volume edition of Smith's works made available the complete Smith opus. In Karen Ordahl Kupperman's new edition her intelligent and imaginative selection and thematic arrangement of Smith's most important writings will make Smith accessible to scholars, students, and general readers alike. Kupperman's introductory material and notes clarify Smith's meaning and the context in which he wrote, while the selections are large enough to allow Captain Smith to speak for himself. As a reasonably priced distillation of the best of John Smith, Kupperman's edition will allow a wide audience to discover what a remarkable thinker and writer he was.

The swashbuckling life of the Elizabethan explorer and colonial governor is vividly recounted in this historical biography. Captain John Smith is best remembered for his association with Pocahontas, but this was only a small part of an extraordinary life filled with danger and adventure. As a soldier, he fought the Turks in Eastern Europe, where he beheaded three Turkish adversaries in duels. He was sold into slavery, then murdered his master to escape. He sailed under a pirate flag, was shipwrecked, and marched to the gallows to be hanged, only to be reprieved at the eleventh hour. All this before he was thirty years old. Smith was one of the founders of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America. He faced considerable danger from the Native Americans as well as from competing factions within the settlement itself. In the face of all this, Smith’s leadership saved the settlement from failure.

"When Captain John Smith and his crew set out from Jamestown to explore a body of water known as the Chesapeake in 1608, they didn't know what to expect"--Jacket flap. The story of the exploration of the Chesapeake Bay, and, in the illustrations, its wildlife.