1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [31]
THE RISK POOL
Most accounts of Jamestown focus on John Smith. No surprise: Smith makes great copy. He was a poor boy who made good with luck, nerve, and self-promotion—in just eighteen years he published no less than five autobiographical accounts of his deeds. (To be fair, one was printed without his knowledge.) The True Travels, Adventures and Observations of Captain John Smith (1630), his major autobiography, is a wild tale of an orphan who left home at thirteen, fought in the Netherlands, lived in a lean-to teaching himself Machiavelli and Marcus Aurelius, battled “a rabble of Pilgrimes of divers Nations going to Rome” aboard a ship in the Mediterranean (they threw him overboard), and became a pirate in the Adriatic—all in the opening chapter. By chapter 4 (its title: “An Excellent Stratagem by Smith”) he is using torches to send coded messages between mountaintops—a technique from Machiavelli—as he coordinates a battle in what is now Hungary. Later chapters reveal:
How Smith served in a Transylvanian army, battling “some Turks, some Tartars, but most Bandittoes, Rennagadoes, and such like.”
How he slew three Turkish aristocrats in single combat before raucous crowds.
How he was captured and sold into slavery in the Ottoman Empire, where “a great ring of iron” was “rivetted about his necke.”
How he seized the chance to “beat out [his master’s] braines” with a farm implement and fled in the man’s clothes to Russia, France, and Morocco.
How in Morocco he joined another band of pirates, preying on Spanish vessels off West Africa.
How he returned to England and promptly joined the Virginia expedition. He was just twenty-six.
Skeptics have been scoffing at this buckle and swash since 1662, when one noted that the sole record of Smith’s adventures is his own writing: “it soundeth much to the dimunition of his deeds, that he alone is the herald to publish and proclaim them.” Other writers cheered him as a quintessential American: the original self-made man. During the Civil War, Smith’s link with Virginia turned him into a symbol of the Confederate South. Northerners naturally tried to belittle him; after writing an article that highlighted inconsistencies in True Travels, historian Henry Adams, a fervent Unionist, crowed that he had executed a “rear attack on the Virginia aristocracy.” The cruelest blow came in 1890, when a Hungarian-speaking researcher charged that the people and places in Smith’s adventures were fictional. Smith, for instance, said he deployed his “excellent stratagem” at a place called “Olumpagh.” No town named Olumpagh existed in the region. QED: Smith was a fraud. In the 1950s a second Hungarian-speaking researcher, Laura Polyani Striker, counterattacked. Smith’s places, she said, were real—the previous researcher had been misled by Smith’s atrocious spelling. Olumpagh, for example, was Lendava, in Slovenia, known to Hungarians in those days as “Al Limbach.” Such places being unknown in England, Striker argued, Smith indeed must have visited them.
Short, stocky, and homely, John Smith had a formidable chestnut beard that startled native people when they encountered it. He was evidently aware of his unprepossessing appearance: this author’s portrait from his 1624 autobiography was accompanied by a doggerel poem, likely penned by Smith, claiming that his interior excellence more than made up for his less than handsome exterior. (Photo credit 2.3)
No historians doubt that Smith was at Jamestown. Nor do they dispute that this scrappy, self-confident man befriended Pocahontas, obtained desperately needed food from Powhatan, saved the colony from extinction, and constantly annoyed the colony’s leaders, all of whom were his social betters. At the time, English class distinctions were rigid to a degree that is hard now to comprehend; Smith, never one to display deference, so quickly angered Jamestown’s gentry that during the voyage from England they threw