Jill Lepore: Four centuries on, the battles over John Smith and Jamestown still rage

AMERICAN CHRONICLES about Captain John Smith and books on Jamestown, Virginia, which celebrates its four-hundredth anniversary this year. It is of more than passing interest that, even before he died, Captain John Smith was widely believed to be a liar, since he was also, arguably, the first American historian. The quadricentennial is a good time to take stock of John Smith, not least because the Library of America has just published a 1,300-page edition of his work.

Born in Lincolnshire in 1850, Smith fought the Spanish in France. Sailing from Marseilles to Italy, he was thrown overboard and rescued by pirates. In 1601, he joined the Austrian army to fight the Turks in Hungary. He was captured and sold into slavery in Istanbul. He escaped and made his way across Europe back to England. In 1606, he sailed to Virginia.

[The article] Discusses a number of books about Jamestown, including Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler’s “Captain John Smith: Jamestown and the Birth of the American Dream” and William M. Kelso’s “Jamestown: The Buried Truth.”

[The] Writer notes that at the time the English were settling Jamestown, the Spanish had already settled St. Augustine, Florida and Santa Fe. [She] Discusses whether the colony of Jamestown was a fiasco or a great success. Smith claimed that many of his fellow settlers were idle and useless. The colonists made enemies of the Powhatan Indians. Many of them died during Jamestown’s early years. Some settlers were reported to have resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. But by the 1620s, the Virginia economy was booming.

Tells about Kelso’s discovery and excavation of the colony’s original fort. Briefly mentions the colony of Roanoke in North Carolina, which did not survive. The question of whether John Smith was a liar is inseparable from the question of whether Jamestown was a failure. Discusses attacks on Smith’s legacy made by 19th century New Englanders, such as Henry Adams, who sought to promote New England as America’s birthplace. Adams and the Harvard professor Gorham Palfrey relegated Smith’s work to the rank of literature. Since then, however, there has been scholarship to substantiate many of Smith’s accounts. Smith was a keen observer and America’s first ethnographer. At the age of 29, Smith returned to England and spent the rest of his life writing. Neither he nor Jamestown can bear the burden of our national need for a tidy past.