Captain John Smith
John Smith kept Jamestown alive by telling gentlemen they would not eat unless they dug, and then wrote the story so well that most of what people believe about it comes from him. He was a Lincolnshire farmer's son who went soldiering in the Low Countries and then in Hungary against the Ottomans, was captured, sold into slavery, and escaped - a career he described at length and that modern historians have found to be broadly corroborated where it can be checked. He sailed with the Virginia Company in 1606 and arrived under arrest for mutiny, only to find his name in the sealed orders naming the governing council. The colony was dying. The settlers included too many gentlemen unwilling to do manual work and almost no farmers, the site was brackish and malarial, and by January 1608 fewer than forty of the original hundred and four were alive. Smith took charge in September 1608 and imposed the rule that he who will not work shall not eat, drilled the settlers, and kept them fed largely by trading with - and extorting from - the Powhatan confederacy. He was injured by a powder burn in 1609 and returned to England. The winter that followed his departure is the one they called the starving time, in which perhaps four-fifths of the colony died. He never returned to Virginia, mapped the New England coast in 1614 and named it, and spent his last years writing. The Pocahontas rescue appears in none of his early accounts and only in the version he published in 1624, seventeen years after the event and seven after her death, which is the main reason it is doubted.
- Lived: 1580 CE – 1631 CE
- Nationality: English
- Roles: explorer, writer
