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...Tempest (1611), complete with Caliban, a savage aboriginal; a passage in one of John Smith's many promotional tracts inspired a verse in Peggy Lee's song Fever (1958)--"Captain Smith and Pocahontas had a very mad affair." In reality, Jamestown was a hardheaded business proposition. The 104 English settlers who stayed when the ships went home--gentlemen, soldiers, privateers, artisans, laborers, boys (no women yet)--were late entrants in the New World sweepstakes. Spain had conquered Mexico by 1521, Peru by 1534. The mines disgorged silver, and by the end of the 16th century, Mexico City and Lima...
Relations between white and red men were the most variable factor in Jamestown's early history. The western Chesapeake was ruled by Wahunsonacock, chief of the Powhatan. He was an expansionist, no less than the English, having brought 30 local tribes under his sway, an empire of 15,000 people. In December 1607, Smith described his royal state: "He sat covered with a great robe, made of raccoon skins, and all the tails hanging by," flanked by "two rows of men, and behind them as many women, with all their heads and shoulders painted red." The settlers hoped to make...
...best of light, Smith was the impolitic outlaw with more grit than tact, the archetypical don't-tread-on-me misfit without whom the fragile experiment at Jamestown would have collapsed within months. What historians can agree on is that he was a victim of his time: the pivotal English figure in the first sustained Anglo-American culture clash, the accidental envoy who would cross the Atlantic but never bridge the broader divide between the two very different civilizations on opposite shores...
...little respect for authority he deemed inept or unearned. His open contempt for those he called "our ignorant transporters" landed Smith in the brig, or some such warren of restraint, where he spent one of the most historic voyages in history as the first inmate of record in English America...
...needs. He made an enemy or two along the way. As the military man who understood the terrain and was the least likely to be missed if he didn't return, Smith was put in charge of seeking local tribes willing to swap corn, fish and game for English copper and glass beads. When one hard-pressed tribe balked at the corn-for-copper trade, Smith ordered his men to rake the village with shot and put the odd lodge to the torch. Terrified natives opened their granary to the armed trespassers, knowing that meant some of their own people...