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John Smith: His Life to 1610

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John Smith: His Life to 1610 The Not So Common Capt. John Smith: His Life to 1610 Richard Welsh, March 24, 2021 We are fortunate that John Smith, like some of his higher-born enemies, did not suffer from excess modesty. The result is that we have a biography – the first remarkable fact about his remarkable life. Outside of nobility, occasional gentry, and Puritan hagiographies of the outstandingly spiritual among them, such things were not written in those days. Smith wrote his own – an act of hubris not least in the list of offenses for which hostile contemporaries condemned him. Of Shakespeare’s life, by contrast, another rising yeoman, we have a few documentary footprints (a good bit more than the occasional claim of “nothing”), but for the most part, little but conjecture, spun from these fragments, and from maybe-true, maybe-not, legends, first recorded long after his death.1 Lacking completely, other than the formulaic medium of a will and a dry legal affidavit, is anything in his own voice. Smith, looking back over his life around the age of 50, captured something of both his own exertions and the obstacles to one of his station that made them so difficult. He wrote, regarding his efforts to organize the building of a commonwealth in New England – one of his most important projects: Had his designes beene to have perswaded men to a mine of gold, though few doth conceive either the charge or paines in refining it, nor the power nor care to defend it; or some new Invention to passe to the South Sea; … or some chargeable Fleet to take some rich Carracks in the East Indies; or Letters of Mark to rob some poor Merchants; what multitudes of both people and mony, would contend to be first employed: but in those noble endevours (now) how few of quality, unless it be to beg some Monopolie; and those seldome seek the common good, but the commons goods ….2 Angered as he was by the immediate failures of his efforts, he was more successful than he probably understood. Though disappointed that he been denied a more active on-the-ground leadership role in England’s colonizing enterprise, he did have the satisfaction at the end of his life that significant forces had finally begun to build a new society in America based on the ideas he had been arguing for nigh-on two decades, in the form of the new Massachusetts Bay colony, 1 For modern studies of Smith, see Barbour, The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith. and Smith, Captain John Smith, His Life and Legend. Lemay, The American Dream of Captain John Smith. is a spirited overall evaluation of Smith and his ideas, written in part as a systematic refutation of his various species of detractor. Smith’s own complete writings, edited with extensive commentary, are available in Smith, Complete Works. edited by Barbour, which also contains elaborations and corrections of some of the material in Barbour’s earlier biography. Much has been published on Smith in the years since these, especially leading into the 2007 quadricentennial celebration of the founding of Jamestown, but these are good places to start. Most of Smith’s works are also available in the Library of America series (Smith, Writings.), and some are available in free online text editions, as noted by URL in the References. 2 Smith, True Travels, 48. Monopolies included, especially the trading companies, the most powerful of which was the East India Company. which unlike the Virginia Company and the Jamestown colony it founded, was established from the get-go as a self-contained commonwealth, beholden neither to stay-at-home investors nor indeed, in practice, to the crown itself. Here we will take up certain key features of Smith’s biography, to establish how he came to play his role as leader and central propagandist for the idea of America as progress-based republic, and as both model and refuge for the rest of Europe and the world. His life makes clear why he retains his place in American lore – terribly romanticized as it may be – and for the same reasons, why those threatened by that idea, from his own day to the present, have used the excuse of debunking the romance to pile on yet deeper layers of fraud. The truth, more fascinating by far than the myth or the counter-myths, is a window on where this country came from. The power of Smith’s image – and of his actions in real life – are simply, that he exemplified the republican conception of humanity, and in doing so represented, to both his own and succeeding generations, the difference between America and the predominant European culture. But while real, that difference can also obscure the continuity of America, with its roots in the European humanist-republican tradition. This organic continuity is often forgotten, overlooked, or misunderstood in thinking about American history. Smith’s importance, then and now, is that he embodies a key constellation of Renaissance ideas and ideals that emerged nearly two centuries before: discovery; scientific and social progress – indeed, the very idea of progress; “the common good” as a primary obligation of both individuals and states; and the need for each individual mind to reach its highest potential. And further: an indifference as to hereditary privilege, other than the goal of eventually abolishing it. Smith was born in 1580 near Louth, a market town in the east of England’s Lincolnshire County, not far from the fishing towns of the North Sea coast, and some 30 miles from Boston (a town, as one might surmise, of much importance later in the planning of the Massachusetts Bay enterprise). This was the northern edge of the region, particularly through its interlinked family networks, that figured most prominently in both the founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony, and its subsequent peopling in the “Great Migration” of 1630-1640.3 His father was a yeoman farmer, that vaguely defined social class in between peasantry and gentry, nothing approaching wealthy, but with hard work, reasonably well off by the standards of the time. Smith senior owned seven acres of pasture and leased additional land from the local noble family, the Berties, Lords Willoughby. After attending local free grammar schools to about the age of 15 – products of the Renaissance-“Humanist” movement associated especially with Erasmus, and its increasingly Puritan descendants – John was apprenticed to a prominent port- town merchant. A year or so later his father died, leaving him a modest inheritance, and being allowed a discharge from his apprenticeship (or seizing it by other means), he adventured himself into the continental wars. 3 This is the region of East Anglia (basal origin of the New England dialect), comprising the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, along with neighboring Cambridge, and to the north, a southern swath of Lincolnshire. The fourth Earl of Lincoln, Theophilus Clinton, provided substantial noble support for the Massachusetts Bay planners, and many of his family went over with Winthrop, whose flagship was named for the earl’s sister, Arabella. Clinton’s grandfather Henry Clinton, the second Earl, we will encounter shortly, as an important patron of Smith’s early training. There he joined an English mercenary troop redeploying from France into the Netherlands, no longer needed by the victorious Henry IV, fighting until then to consolidate his kingship. His unit campaigned on and off for three to four years, in the now three-decade-old Dutch Revolt against Spanish Hapsburg rule. When fighting fell off for the moment, he returned to England, where his late father’s landlord, Lord Willoughby, engaged him as one of two servants to accompany a son, Peregrine Bertie, on the youth’s grand tour of France, a common conclusion to noble educations. The Willoughby funds ran short, however, and less than two months later, though with some French under his belt, Smith was heading home, and thence north to Scotland where a position appeared to be open at the court in Edinburgh. He survived a shipwreck off the Scottish coast, recovered there from associated injuries or illness, found no employment, and headed home to Lincolnshire, now unusually well-travelled and richly experienced for one of his age (19 or 20) and class, most of whom would be lucky to journey beyond their home counties (not counting those dispossessed of their livelihoods by conversion of cropland to sheep pasture – “enclosures” – whose one-way trip out, landed them in the seedy townhouses of fast-swelling, enhanced-mortality, London). Smith had been a common foot-soldier, but nothing like the ignorant, comic, or noxious lowlifes caricatured by Shakespeare in the likes of Bardolph, Pistol, and the rest of the conscriptees and pillagers of the Henry IV-Henry V plays. He had had basic schooling to about the age of 15 (intensive Latin, rhetoric, and other language-focussed subjects), and some mercantile training; and now, back in Lincolnshire, his life diverged yet farther from the common lot. Now, he occupied a cabin, hermit-like, in a “woody pasture.” This was likely part of a Willoughby, or possibly Earl of Lincoln, estate, where he lived on venison (therefore clearly subsisting by noble permission – Robin Hood being quite out of date), practiced his military skills – and studied. The full extent of his reading we do not know. The few titles he does identify, in his highly condensed autobiography, are Machiavelli’s Art of War, and portions of Vannocchio Biringuccio’s Pirotechnia, the foremost Renaissance work on mining, metallurgy, and high- temperature technologies, both industrial and military. This had first been issued in 1540, and translated into English and published together with the Machiavelli about 1560.
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