Midcoast Senior College Sea-Change: Shakespeare, John Smith, and the New World Republic Spring 2021 Richard Welsh

The Not So Common Capt. John Smith: Pitching New April 24, 2021

John Smith made embarked on three New England voyages, but only the first, in 1614, made it across the Atlantic. The second, the next year, after first being dismasted and returning to port for repairs, was subsequently captured by an English pirate vessel, but released (the pirates recognizing and respecting Smith from previous lives); and then seized again by a French privateer, on which Smith became a well-treated captive. He escaped from that ship shortly before it went down in a storm off the coast of France, and that was the end of that expedition. The sojourn on the French craft did give him time, however, to write his Description of New England, which he published in 1616. With some difficulty – some earlier patrons having lost confidence in his luck at sea – he secured backing for a third voyage, but this one was stuck in port in (in Devonshire, part of England’s West Country) for months on end, as strong westerly winds bottled up all westward shipping. His funding running out for maintenance of supplies and crew, he was forced to abandon this third attempt.

He had not given up, however. His next step was to hit the pavement and the printing press, pitching his project ideas to various levels of government, business organizations, and high-ranking influentials, to excite support for a further attempt. These all failed, leaving us with a procession of his writings from 1618 to 1622, and him with nothing to show for his efforts. The full sequence, from his first publication on the subject, are:

1616 A Description of New England 1618 Letter to Sir Francis Bacon 1620 New England’s Trials 1622 New England’s Trials (2nd edition)

The publications, including the progress of Smith’s own thoughts and sources that they evidence, are described in the introductions to each in Philip Barbour’s Complete Works of Captain John Smith (the standard modern edition), which are appended below. These are taken from the digital version of Barbour’s books, as published on the Virtual Jamestown web site, and may have some minor scanning errors. Barbour’s footnotes have been removed. The web page is here: http://www.virtualjamestown.org/exist/cocoon/jamestown/fha- js/SmiWorks1

As noted in part in Barbour’s introductions, other people and institutions were making moves into New England during this period. These included West Country and other fishing interests; colonial projects of a starkly aristocratic temper (the model Sir Ferdinando Gorges’s , organized in 1619 and chartered in 1620); and religious separatists – small congregations that had broken all ties with the Church of England. Smith comments on the latter – America’s “Pilgrims” – in the 1622 book, commending them for their fortitude through the two winters they had survived (with huge mortality) since arriving at Plymouth, Massachusetts, while clucking over their foolishness in preferring his book to his actual services, which had been under negotiation prior to their departure. He is also able to reflect on the 1622 Powhatan Indian uprising in Virginia, which had taken the lives of a third of the settlers, and revealed the illusions under which the colony had been operating. Here are Barbour’s introductions to the New England writings.

Letter to Sir Francis Bacon 1618

INTRODUCTION

Background

Prince Henry, heir to the thrones of England and Scotland, received a tenth-birthday gift in 1604 from the lord high admiral in the form of a small, but seaworthy, vessel. Two years later the boy's uncle, King Christian IV of Denmark, gave him the best fighting ship in the Danish royal navy, in token of the prince's nautical bent. Toward the close of that same year Prince Henry's gunner sailed for Virginia with Smith and the other original planters. The sea had already turned Henry's mind in the direction of British expansion overseas.

When Henry died at an early age, and his brother Charles seemed not to have like interests, "suitors" for royal favor such as John Smith turned instead to wealthy noblemen, knights, and merchants for practical help, while continuing to pay token homage to Prince Charles. Thus, after soliciting the latter's grace in the matter of "English names for Indian" in the Description of New England, Smith dedicated a personal copy to the lord chancellor, Thomas Egerton, Baron Ellesmere (since 1603), who was created Viscount Brackley on November 7, 1616, some five months after the Descrip- tion of New England was run off. Regrettably for Smith, the viscount, aged seventy-seven, died in March 1617. Sir Francis Bacon immediately took up Egerton's duties.

Sir Francis had been attorney general, then privy councillor, but he first received the great seal of the lord chancellor with the lesser title of lord keeper (his father had held the same post under Queen Elizabeth). Then, early in 1618, Bacon was raised to the chancellorship, and on July 12 to the peerage as Baron Verulam. Smith resolved to take a bolder step than he had with Egerton. Bacon, a scholar who had written about plantations, now a politician in a position to promote them, was certainly a most promising backer. Smith rapidly set to work to make at least a booklet out of some notes and something he had read.

Obviously, Smith was not the only Englishman to think of approaching the new peer. William Strachey, the ex-secretary of the Jamestown colony,1 still hoped in 1618 for employment in Virginia. He, too, turned to Bacon. But neither he nor Smith knew that the great man was plagued by creditors, as well as suitors, and was tarnishing the splendor of his high office by accepting emoluments of a nature not unlike bribes. It is small wonder, then, that Bacon paid no heed to Smith or to Strachey.

Smith's plea-proposal to Bacon holds a watershed position in his career as a writer. From the descriptive, narrative, and explanatory (or justificatory) modes of the True Relation, the Map of Virginia, and the Proceedings (so far as he was involved in this work), Smith seems to have moved in the Description of New England3 to the role of publicist. Although he made a final (and unsuccessful) try at active seafaring life late in 1616, by 1618 he appears to have become at least halfway content with propagandizing for, and pleading the cause of, colonization. This theory is admittedly at odds with the considered opinions of some modern critics who tend to regard the three New England writings as three versions of a single tract.4 The editor believes rather that the Description of New England should be regarded as a turning point, with the "Letter to Bacon" as the preface to a new presentation of the question of plantations (i.e., the settlement of Englishmen) in New England. Seen in this light, the two versions of New Englands Trials are an extended exposition of his proposal to Bacon. It may even be that Smith was already considering rounding out this work with the "history of the Sea," to which he referred years later in his Advertisements.5 If so, the Generall Historie came as an interlude, unexpected, yet welcome and surely encouraging; but his thoughts immediately turned again to the sea. He produced the Accidence and the Sea Grammar, then, under persuasion, the True Travels -- vainglorious memoirs of all-but-forgotten soldiering a quarter century before, eked out with scraps of recent information from the colonies. This book was still in press when Smith's fiftieth birthday came (possibly with the impact of a modern man's eightieth), and suddenly Smith produced his final warning and encouragement to colonial adventurers and entrepreneurs -- the Advertisements. Significantly, its stress is on New England, not Virginia.

This long digression has seemed to the editor worth inserting, for without some theory or conjectural commentary the "Letter to Bacon" and the twice-printed New Englands Trials seem to form mere collections of fragments tossed off after the 1616 work, while Smith was Micawberishly "waiting for something to turn up."

[…]

Summary

The "Letter to Bacon" and the two editions of New Englands Trials have the same basic content and the same general arrangement, though expanded in each new version. The "Letter to Bacon" opens with a brief explanation of the geographical location of New England, followed by a few words on what Smith has seen and done there. Next, without further ado, comes a compendium of statistical information on fishing and the profits to be made thereby, with seven paragraphs of supporting proofs. The information is presented in a straightforward way and is obviously based on facts or the published testimony of another author. The rest of the "Letter to Bacon" is taken up with side-advantages, particularly the traffic in furs, coupled with an apology of sorts for presenting so unglamorous a proposal to so noble a peer. In short, the "Letter to Bacon" is but a sketch that did not take final form until the second edition of New Englands Trials in 1622.

New England’s Trials 1620

INTRODUCTION

As has been explained in the Introduction to Smith's "Letter to Bacon," the earliest possible date for that appeal would be after July 12, 1618, when Bacon was raised to the peerage. The latest likely date for the first edition of New Englands Trials is December 11, 1620, when it was entered for publication in the Stationers' Register. The trivial changes Smith made to convert the "Letter to Bacon" into the first edition of New Englands Trials would hardly have kept Smith busy for two years, despite its considerably expanded peroration. Consequently, although the editor has already offered some suggestions elsewhere, a few historical details are added here in an attempt to close the gap.

In the spring of 1618, Sir Walter Ralegh returned from his suicidal Guiana expedition, begun in 1617, and by August 10 he was again in the Tower, accused, as he was in 1603, of high treason. Such was the Spanish ambassador's pressure on the king of England that it was now merely a matter of whether Ralegh would be executed in or in Spain. On October 29, he was beheaded in London. This has bearing on John Smith in that the separatist group now called the Pilgrims, who had thought of emigrating from Holland to Guiana, then began to look toward North America, but somewhere beyond the direct control of the governor in Jamestown or the Council for Virginia in London. By that time the Virginia Company's administration was under attack, and on April 28, 1619, Sir Edwin Sandys, a staunch Puritan, was chosen to succeed Sir Thomas Smythe as treasurer. Six weeks later, the council granted a patent to the Pilgrims. For one reason or another, it was never used.

Meanwhile, Sir Ferdinando Gorges was organizing still another expedition to New England, but as yet no colony. On December 1, 1619, he appeared in person at a meeting of the Council for Virginia to protest against a fishing expedition off Cape Cod launched from Jamestown, which was an infringement of the dormant, if not defunct, rights of the North Virginia Company. Early in 1620, then, determined to maintain the rights of the West Country entrepreneurs, whom he represented, Gorges petitioned the king for a new patent to replace that of 1606, in the name of the "Council for the Second Colony and Others," or the "Council for New England," as it came to be called. (Parenthetically, it would surely have amused Smith, if he heard it, that the governor in Jamestown authorized a party to fish off "Smith's Island" in New England -- not the lord governor's, not Argall's, not Gorges's, but Smith's!) Finally, on November 3, 1620, the charter for New England was properly sealed. By then, New Englands Trials was in press. Conceivably Smith had been busy during those two years watching which way the wind was blowing. Perhaps in 1620 the new administration of the Virginia Company would look upon him with more favor; perhaps Gorges's activities would end in a colonial settlement after all. Then, suddenly, Smith apparently decided to get his ideas into print anyway. New England was certainly the watchword late in 1620.

It is time now to explain the meaning of "trials." In Smith's title, "trials" surely meant anything but "tribulations," yet not quite "proofs," as suggested by Emerson. Basically, "trials" meant "things tried," thus "experiments, essays," or, as the OED explains, actions adopted in order to ascertain the result of something, investigations by means of experience, the exercise of trial and error.

Smith was always ready to make such trials himself, and at almost any risk; yet he was always willing to, and often did, use the record of other explorers and trailblazers to support his own ideas and plans. His onetime backer Sir Ferdinando Gorges was, oddly, both more skeptical and more patiently persistent in trying than was Smith. Gorges wanted real tests with experimental winter camps before he would seriously consider the establishment of a colony of any size. Smith, with his Jamestown years behind him, was certain that no further testing (or proving) was necessary. But both Gorges and Smith needed financial backing, and so in the long run both of them had to convince merchants or other entrepreneurs that colonization would be profitable, or at least self-sustaining.

In the midst of this, while Gorges was testing, and before Smith's New Englands Trials was entered for publication, the Pilgrims from Leiden simply sailed over to Cape Cod Bay and founded the first permanent colony in New England. Religious scruples moved men regardless of Gorges's need for security (a safe place in winter) or Smith's need for lucre. Amusingly, when Smith heard about the Pilgrims he did not like the religion that moved them, even though they put into practice precisely what he preached.

Of Smith's book proper, as opposed to the rough, handwritten draft that had been sent to Sir Francis Bacon, there is little to say. The printed work shows that Smith had at least extended his use of data from other sources, such as Robert Hitchcock; John Dee, the inventor of the name "British Empire"; John Keymor, the obscure economist; and Tobias Gentleman, the even more obscure "fisherman and mariner," as he called himself. Smith had also polished his text with a bit more eloquence. But all in all, he had whipped it into shape so quickly that it amounted to little more than a printed edition of the "Letter to Bacon." It was not until the second edition (1622) that a substantially improved work appeared.

Summary

If a summary be needed for so short a work, it can be pointed out that the first eleven pages, to the bottom of sig. C2r, are little more than a restatement of the subject matter of Smith's "Letter to Bacon." The remaining four and a half pages include a few additional ideas borrowed from John Dee and a repetition of Smith's by now familiar propaganda for settlement overseas. As has already been mentioned, the second edition (1622) is a trifle better organized and covers the subject more thoroughly. The 1620 work is interesting as a hurried printing of a hurried appeal, with such little polishing as Smith found time to apply.

New England’s Trials 1622

INTRODUCTION

In introducing this small book, it may be well to take what accountants would call a subtotal of Smith's narratives of English expansion overseas, so far. (The grand total will come with his Advertisements.) The 1622 edition of New Englands Trials was prepared for publication following two noteworthy events in English colonial history: (1) the survival of Jamestown after the Indian massacre of March 1622, and (2) the survival of the Pilgrims in New England through two winters. Thus, two roots of today's United States of America had been planted in different soils with differing objectives, and had proved sturdy and capable of permanence.

Yet Smith's colonial dream was neither realized in full, nor would it be fully realizable for many years. In his Description of New England he had written, "I am not so simple, to thinke, that ever any other motive then wealth, will ever erect there a Commonweale; or draw companie from their ease and humours at home, to stay in New England to effect my purposes."1 Although the presence of the Pilgrims in New England (and the plans of the Puritans to settle there also) shows that Smith was mistaken, yet in a broader sense he was remarkably foresighted, or clairvoyant. The influx of people needed to create the great colony that later became the United States, not just New England, was produced by the opportunities available in America not only to be free, but even more to be rich.

Historians generally, however, have seen early New England as a land settled by people inspired by religious motivation -- in the first place by a group that wanted to escape from everybody else, and in the second by a much larger group that wanted to get away from religious bureaucratic oppression in England and that chose to face the presumably tameable "wildmen" of Massachusetts rather than to continue facing the intractability of the likes of Bishop Laud (soon to be elevated to the archbishopric of Canterbury). In other words, the Pilgrims were not colonists in the old Roman sense that surely lurked in the back of Smith's mind, and he had hard things to say about them. But neither were the Puritans who poured out of King Charles's London to seek the shores of the river Charles, more than a thousand leagues away, and they found favor in the eyes of Smith. Years after the publication of the 1622 edition of New Englands Trials, Smith thought he saw his type of colonist in these resolute and voluntary exiles.

Samuel Eliot Morison, though he claims that Smith was mistaken about the importance of wealth as a lure for settlers, has drawn a fine line between those who were driven to New England by religious scruples and the true colonists who went there to better their lot. By way of illustration Morison has quoted J. Franklin Jameson. The story of the Pilgrims, Jameson wrote, is that

of a small and feeble enterprise, ... always limited by the slender resources of the poor and humble men who originated it [Plymouth]. The founding of the Bay Colony, on the other hand, was less a colonial enterprise than a great puritan emigration. It was organized by men of substance and standing, supported by wealth of a great and prosperous body of the English nation, and consciously directed toward the high end of founding in America a great puritan state.

Smith was "over-glad ... to see Industry her selfe adventure now to make use of my aged endevours," as the well-financed Puritan faction dispatched ship after ship across the Atlantic to the shores of Smith's own New England. He was especially happy that a friend of his, of Edwardston (Suffolk), could assure him that "factious Humourists" (like the Pilgrims) would not be suffered to join Winthrop's colonists.

The second edition of New Englands Trials, then, completes Smith's story of New England (except for brief supplementary notices in the Generall Historie and the True Travels) until Smith's final summation of his thoughts on "the Path-way to erect a Plantation" in the Advertisements. This edition adds a number of updating details to the first edition, and elaborates on two of his favorite themes: his personal and almost proprietary interest in New England and his experiences with the native inhabitants. Regarding the latter, he finds here his first occasion to refer in print to his rescue by Pocahontas: "God made Pocahontas the Kings daughter the meanes to deliver me." He also seizes an opportunity to mention the prince of Transylvania, Zsigmond Báthory, who not only granted him a kind of coat of arms, but also gave him 1,500 ducats, which he later spent on Virginia.

Summary

New Englands Trials (1622) is easily summarized. From the beginning of the text through sig. B4r (almost half of the book) the 1620 edition is reprinted, with scattered additions amounting to a total of two and a quarter pages. None of these is of any great interest. On sig. B4v begins a long, new passage, which fills almost nine pages. This has to do first with the founding of Plymouth colony, including some correspondence from there that seems not to have been preserved elsewhere. Then comes a bit on the Virginia massacre, which leads Smith to review his own career there (sig. C2v), including his voyages among the Indians. This is logically followed by examples of some difficulties in New England. Near the bottom of sig. C3v Smith opens an indirect defense of himself against those who accuse him of being unlucky. Neither the accusation nor the defense seems unusual, granted the superstitious bent of the times and Smith's bias against people who sit at home and risk nothing. Finally, almost all of sig. D (eight pages) is devoted to propaganda for New England, the bulk of it from the first edition. Though this volume is not a weighty one, it contains some additional matter of value (particularly, sigs. B4v-C1v). It is well worth reading and pondering for its position in the Smith corpus and for the glimpse it gives of Smith's real interest in New England, as well as of the increased breadth of his reading. Possibly the most important part of the book lies in the "documentation" of the New England voyages from his own first voyage in 1614 to about October 16, 1622.