BOOK S.

CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH.*

Tins thick volume of nearly a thousand pages, many of which are in small type, is on the whole more curious than readable. Captain *Smith's mode of telling his story is a little tedious.. He delights in details, but as he goes frequently over the same- ground in his numerous publications, repetition is inevitable. He demands perhaps more patience than is likely to be given to him in these busy days, save by such scholars as Mr. Arber ; but students of the period will discover a mine of wealth in these pages. The labour of the editor in producing this "literary monument of one of the best and bravest of English- men " must have been immense ; and if the result is not likely to be largely appreciated by the public, Mr. Arber is secure of the " fit audience," whose approbation he probably covets most.

When James I. wrote his Counterblast to Tobacco, he did not know that, to quote the words of a well-known writer, " it is mainly owing to tobacco, and perhaps also to the fur-trade, that the present population of North America is of Anglo-Saxon origin." It was in 1585 that Sir Walter Raleigh's expedition landed the first colonists on the shores of Chesapeake Bay. A series of disasters followed, produced partly by the rash folly of the colonists and partly by the treachery of the natives. When Captain Smith was President of the James River Settlement, in the early years of the seventeenth century, the want of harmony among the settlers forms a prominent feature of his narrative. They were as ready to quarrel among themselves as they were to quarrel with the natives. Smith did not escape, but was kept, he relates, for thirteen weeks as a prisoner on the pretence that he intended to usurp the Government, murder the Council, and make himself king. At this time the colonists suffered, as they did frequently, from an extremity of want. " Had we been," one of Smith's comrades writes," as free from all. other sins as gluttony and drunkenness, we might have been canonised for saints." There were one hundred souls in all, but the number of men was rapidly thinned by sickness and privation.. Between May and September, 1607, fifty were buried, which did but make the rest more mutinous, and the captain takes credit to himself for preventing a mutiny and shooting the ring- leader. The men were reduced to thirty-eight when Smith became president, yet small though it was, the colony broke

into two parties; and the books written after Captain Smith's

return to England in 1609 may be said to have been published in self-defence. Mr. Arber considers that they are thoroughly trustworthy.

"Inasmuch," he writes, "as the accuracy of some of Captain Smith's statements has in this generation been called in question, it was but our duty to subject every one of the nearly forty thousand- lines of this book to a most searching criticism ; scanning every assertion of fact most keenly, and making the text, by the insertion of a multitude of cross-references, prove or disprove itself. The result is perfectly satisfactory. Allowing for a popular style of expression, the text is homogeneous, and the nine books comprising it, though • The English Scholar's Library. " Captain John Smith, President of Virginia and Admiral of New England. (Works, nosJon.)." Edited by Edward Arber, Birmingham.

written under very diverse circumstances, and at intervals over the period of twenty-two years, contain no material contradictions."

The narratives are not wholly free from such strange stories as Othello told to Desdemona. Thus Smith relates how some natives carried in a great hole in the ear a small snake near half a yard in length, "which,crawling and lapping herself about his neck, oftentimes familiarly would kiss his lips ;" and how others wore a dead rat tied by the tail. The romantic narrative of the way in which, when taken prisoner, Smith was saved from death by Pocahontas, the King's daughter, is con- firmed by his companions. The tale is told by one of them as follows :—

" At his entrance before the King, all the people gave a great shout. The Queen of Appamatuck was appointed to bring him water to wash his hands, and another brought him a bunch of feathers, instead of a towel, to dry them. Having feasted him after their best barbarous manner they could, a long consultation was held ; but the conclusion was, two great stones were brought before Powhatan ; then as many as could laid hands on him, dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs to beat out his brains, Pocahontas, the King's dearest daughter, when no entreaty could prevail, got his head in her arms, and laid her own upon his to save him from death, whereat the Emperor was contented he should live."

The young girl's kind-heartedness did not end here. Accom- panied by her attendants, she frequently carried provisions to the settlers at James Town, and " saved many of their lives that else, for all this, had starved with hunger." At another time Pocahontas, "in the dark night, came through the irk- some woods " to tell Captain Smith of a conspiracy to murder him and his companions. " Such things as she delighted in he would have given her ; but, with the tears running down her cheeks, she said she durst not be seen to have any, for if Powhatan should know it she were best dead ; and so she ran away by herself as she came." After this, and when Smith had left the colony, Pocahontas was taken prisoner by the English, in order that the King might be forced to return certain goods he had stolen. Then, to add to the romance of the story, " Master John Rolfe, an honest gentleman, and of good behaviour, fell in love with her, and she with him. The King gave his consent to the marriage, which led, it is said, to lasting peace between Powhatan and the colonists. Two years later Pocahontas went to England with her husband, where she was instructed in Christianity, and " became very formal and civil, after our English manner." - There is much in the " Works " of Smith which will be passed over rapidly by most readers, very much that is almost verbal repetition. " The New-England's Trials, 1622," for example, is a repetition, with some additions, of the same tract or pamphlet published in 1620; and the "General History of Virginia," printed in 1624, repeats much that will be found in the description of the country published in 1612. Mr. Arber regards such iteration as of service in illustrating the truthfulness of the writer. " For some portions of the story there are three versions ; for other portions, two ; a minute study of these successive accounts will show additions and omissions of facts, but no material contra- dictions." The proof of this may be tested with the help of the editor's elaborate cross-references ; but most readers will be content to accept his assurance, given after " a minute study," that Captain Smith is a veracious and unboastful writer.

The greater part of his life seems to have been devoted to foreign travel and to the adventures and discoveries so charac- teristic of the age. The wars in Europe, Asia, and Africa, he said, had taught him how to subdue the wild savages in Virginia and New England. In his youth he fought in the Low Countries, was nearly starved to death, and Jonah-like on his way to Italy, was thrown overboard by the sailors, who cursed him for a Huguenot, and swore " that they should never have fair weather so long as he was aboard them." Then we read of his presence in a desperate sea-fight, of his travels on the continent, of his joining the Austrian Army to fight against the Turks, when he had his horse slain under him, and himself was

sore wounded. Later on we find him, on a challenge from the Turks, engaging three times in single combat. In the first,— " At the sound of the charge, he passed the Turk through the sight of his beaver, face, head, and all, that be fell dead to the

ground, where alighting and unbracing his helmet, be cut off his head, and the Turks took his body and so returned without

any hurt at all." Then a friend of the dead Turk was so en- raged, that he sent a challenge to the conqueror to regain his friend's head, or lose his own with his horse and armour also ;

but he also shared the fate of his friend. Once more Smith challenged the Turks to redeem the two heads, and the chal- lenge was accepted. It may be worth while to quote the result as recorded in Parches, and here reprinted from a narrative edited by Smith, but written by an Italian :—

" The next day both the champions entering the field as before,. each discharging their pistol (having no lances, but such martial weapons as the defendant appointed), no hurt was done; their battle- axes was the next, whose piercing bills made sometime the one some- time the other to have scarce sense to keep their saddles ; specially the Christian received such a blow, that he lost his battle-axe, and failed not much to have fallen after it, whereat the supposing con- quering Turk had a great shout from the rampiers. The Turk pro- secuted his advantage to the uttermost of his power ; yet the other, what by the readiness of his horse, and his judgment and dexterity in such a business, beyond all men's expectation, by God's assist- ance, not only avoided the Turk's violence, but having drawn his falchion pierced the Turk so under the culets, through back and body, that although he alighted from his horse, he stood not long ere he lost his bead as the rest had done."

Smith was not always so fortunate, for in a "dismal battle' with the Turks he was taken prisoner and carried to Constanti- nople, where a kind mistress, Charatza Tragabigzanda by name, seems to have fallen in love with him. Meanwhile, fearing lest her mother should sell the captive, she sent him to her brother in Tartary, who " half suspected as much as she intended " when

"time made her master of herself," and therefore treated him with great cruelty, and rivetted a great ring of iron round his.

neck. How Smith, " forgetting all reason," beat out his master's brains, hid his body, clothed himself in his clothes, filled his knapsack with corn, mounted his horse, and escaped to the desert ; and how, after long wandering in fear and torment, his irons were knocked off, and a lady "largely supplied his wants "— must be read in this strange narrative. Captain Smith, lik e Dugala Dalgetty, was a soldier of fortune, a profession looked upon with no disfavour in that age even by men of rank and position. To fight in any war was deemed more honourable than a peaceful vocation, and to fight against Turks and infidels gave to the warfare a religious character. The six brothers of the poet George Herbert, for example, were all men who fought in the Low Countries and elsewhere, not in defence of a cause, but for the sake of fighting. Captain Smith did what other bold English- men did, but he had a wider field for his exploits than most men, and in many difficult positions he displayed qualities of a high order. Even in those days, there were scrupulous spirits who doubted the right of England to take possession of other lands, although the owners were savages ; but Smith looked upon colonisation as a religious duty.

" God," he writes, " did make the world to be inhabited with mankind, and to have his name known to all nations, and from generation to generation ; as the people increased they dis- persed themselves into such countries as they found most con- venient. And here in Florida, Virginia, New England, and Canada is more land than all the people in Christendom can manure [cultivate], and yet more to spare than all the natives of those countries can use and culturate. And shall we here keep such a coil for land and at such great rents and rates, when there is so much of the world uninhabited ?" It is curious to read of this "coil for land," and of such great rents, two. centuries and a half ago, when the whole population of England and Wales did not exceed five millions.

We may add that Mr. Arber's very exalted estimate of Captain Smith's character as " one of the best of Englishmen " is not one that can be accepted without reservation. As an adventurer, sailor, and colonist, he displayed no doubt many fine qualities ; but it can hardly be said that he reached or even approached the highest type of character.