This book examines the character, writings, and ideals of Captain John Smith. Before sailing for Jamestown in 1607, Smith fought in two major European theatres of war, finally serving as captain of a Christian cavalry company in the Balkans fighting against the Turks. In America, he became early Virginia's most famous and feared Indian fighter. Powhatan himself testified that "if a twig but breake every one cryeth there commeth Captaine Smith". According to the author, Smith was also one of the 17th century's greatest political and social egalitarians and visionaries. His American Dream prefigured and contributed to the ideals that Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Joel Barlow, James Madison, and other founders of the American republic built into their aspirations for a new nation and new society. The author describes Smith as an explorer whose skill was unmatched in his time as well as a skilled diplomat and trader who treated the Indians fairly and with respect.

"That question has been asked repeatedly for centuries; now, here is the most definitive answer. Captain John Smith explores the true history behind the man who would become the person most directly responsible for the survival of the Jamestown colony. Based on Smith's own writings - which history has proven to be accurate - and on letters and diaries from other Jamestown colonists and archives in both Virginia and England, this enlightening volume focuses in riveting detail on the years Smith spent in Jamestown and his efforts to promote the colony after his return to England, while also covering his swashbuckling earlier life.".

By the mid-nineteenth century, Captain John Smith, the early colonial explorer and settler, was a well-known figure in American history. The story of how, in 1607, the Powhatan princess Pocahontas saved him from execution by her tribe appeared in all the standard American histories. Numerous plays, novels, and poems were devoted to the episode. Starting in the 1860s, however, scholars began to question Smith's published accounts of the Pocahontas incident, and a controversy ensued, with Henry Adams becoming Smith's most famous detractor. Today many scholars continue to regard Smith as a vainglorious braggart who lied about his rescue. J. A. Leo Lemay offers the first full analysis of the historiography of this debate. Examining all of the primary and secondary evidence, he persuasively demonstrates that the incident did in fact occur. A tightly argued study, Did Pocahontas Save Captain John Smith? not only refutes the outright skeptics; it effectively reverses the prevailing judgment that the truth will never be known.

As Schmidt circles the Bay counterclockwise from Jamestown, she explores Smith's encounters with Native Americans and the Bay's ecological changes over the past hundred years. On each river and creek, she quotes Smith's journals on matching wits with Powhatan, meeting Pocahontas, surviving thunderstorms, ambush, and a stingray's barb. Anchored on wild creeks, Schmidt observes swans and dragonflies, lightning and sunsets; in port she interviews colorful characters and working watermen about blue crabs and oysters.

A New York Times Notable Book and aSan Jose Mercury News Top 20 Nonfiction Book of 2003In 1606, approximately 105 British colonists sailed to America, seeking gold and a trade route to the Pacific. Instead, they found disease, hunger, and hostile natives. Ill prepared for such hardship, the men responded with incompetence and infighting; only the leadership of Captain John Smith averted doom for the first permanent English settlement in the New World.The Jamestown colony is one of the great survival stories of American history, and this book brings it fully to life for the first time. Drawing on extensive original documents, David A. Price paints intimate portraits of the major figures from the formidable monarch Chief Powhatan, to the resourceful but unpopular leader John Smith, to the spirited Pocahontas, who twice saved Smith’s life. He also gives a rare balanced view of relations between the settlers and the natives and debunks popular myths about the colony. This is a superb work of history, reminding us of the horrors and heroism that marked the dawning of our nation.

A biography of explorer and adventurer John Smith.