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.

Captain John Smith dmiral of New England, was an English soldier, explorer, and author. He was knighted for his services to Sigismund Báthory, Prince of Transylvania, and his friend Mózes Székely. He was considered to have played an important part in the establishment of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America. He was a leader of the Virginia Colony (based at Jamestown) between September 1608 and August 1609, and led an exploration along the rivers of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay. He was the first English explorer to map the Chesapeake Bay area and New England. His books and maps were important in encouraging and supporting English colonization of the New World. He gave the name New England to the region and noted: "Here every man may be master and owner of his owne labour and land... If he have nothing but his hands, he may...by industries quickly grow rich." When Jamestown was England's first permanent settlement in the New World, Smith trained the settlers to farm and work, thus saving the colony from early devastation. He publicly stated "He that will not work, shall not eat", quoting from the Bible, 2nd Thessalonians 3:10. Harsh weather, lack of water, living in a swampy wilderness and attacks from the Powhatan Indians almost destroyed the colony. The Jamestown settlement survived and so did Smith, but he had to return to England after being injured by an accidental explosion of gunpowder in a boat.

He fought and 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. And all this happened before he was thirty years old. This is Captain John Smith’s life. Everyone knows the story of Pocahontas, and how in 1607 she saved John Smith. And were it not for Smith’s leadership, the Jamestown colony would surely have failed. Yet Smith was a far more ambitious explorer and soldier of fortune than these tales suggest – and a far more ambitious self-promoter, too. With A Man Most Driven, Firstbrook delivers a riveting, enlightening dissection of this myth-making man, England’s arrival on the world stage, and the creation of America.

By age thirty-four Captain John Smith was already a well-known adventurer and explorer. He had fought as a mercenary in the religious wars of Europe and had won renown for fighting the Turks. He was most famous as the leader of the Virginia Colony at Jamestown, where he had wrangled with the powerful Powhatan and secured the help of Pocahontas. By 1614 he was seeking new adventures. He found them on the 7,000 miles of jagged coastline of what was variously called Norumbega, North Virginia, or Cannada, but which Smith named New England. This land had been previously explored by the English, but while they had made observations and maps and interacted with the native inhabitants, Smith found that "the Coast is . . . even as a Coast unknowne and undiscovered." The maps of the region, such as they were, were inaccurate. On a long, painstaking excursion along the coast in a shallop, accompanied by sailors and the Indian guide Squanto, Smith took careful compass readings and made ocean soundings. His Description of New England, published in 1616, which included a detailed map, became the standard for many years, the one used by such subsequent voyagers as the Pilgrims when they came to Plymouth in 1620. The Sea Mark is the first narrative history of Smith's voyage of exploration, and it recounts Smith's last years when, desperate to return to New England to start a commercial fishery, he languished in Britain, unable to persuade his backers to exploit the bounty he had seen there.

"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.