John Smith Assumes Presidency of Jamestown

Captain Smith and Pocahontas
U.S. Capitol Frescoes,
Theodor Horydczak, photographer,
circa 1920-1950.
Washington as It Was, 1923-1959

Explorer, writer, and cartographer John Smith assumed the presidency of the Jamestown settlement on September 10, 1608. The charismatic and controversial Smith was initially excluded from the government of the settlement on grounds he conspired to mutiny en route to Virginia. His comrades' suspicions notwithstanding, Smith became the de facto leader of the colony during the difficult winter of 1607 and 1608, which visited disease, starvation, and frequent raids upon the settlement by Native Americans.

Portrait of Pocahontas
photograph, circa 1900-1920, of painting in the United States Capitol,
copy of 1616 original by William Sheppard, Barton Rectory, Norfolk, England.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920

A brash and boldly self-confident figure, Smith brought years of soldiering experience to the Virginia venture. While fighting the Turks in Transylvania, he was wounded, captured, and sold, he claimed, into slavery in Turkey. Smith reported that he eventually escaped with the assistance of a Turkish woman who had fallen in love with him. All this before his adventures in America!

Whether or not Smith's reportage was accurate, his version of his role in the survival of the Jamestown colony was accepted as fact by subsequent generations of Americans. In Virginia, Smith led the settlers' resistance against frequent raids by the Algonquin Indians who made their homes in the Chesapeake region. He also ventured into surrounding territory to forage for food, negotiate with Native Americans, and trade trinkets with them in exchange for corn.

In December 1607, Captain Smith was captured and brought before Algonquin Chief Powhatan. In a book written much later, Smith described how Pocahontas, the chief's young daughter, saved his life by throwing herself between him and the warriors ordered to execute him.

The tale of Smith's rescue by the Indian princess Pocahontas first appeared in his own Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, published in 1624. The event, now part of our national mythology, was probably romanticized by Smith. However, Pocahontas's intervention appears to resemble a ritual familiar to many Native American groups.

Baptism of Pocahontas, 1614
Oil study for mural by John Gadsby Chapman, circa 1837-40,
Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation Educational Trust.
America as a Religious Refuge: The Seventeenth Century, Part 2 in
Religion and the Founding of the American Republic
The Baptism of Pocahontas

Like other seventeenth-century British colonists, Virginians were actively encouraged to convert the native population. The Virginia Company's instructions to its governors required them to make conversion one of their objectives. The most famous early convert was Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, head of the Powhatan Confederacy. Pocahontas was baptized by the Reverend Alexander Whitaker before her marriage to John Rolfe in 1614.

On June 22, 1607, John Smith and five other settlers signed a letter reporting on the status of the colony to the directors of the charter in England. In this excerpt, they expound upon the natural bounty of the land:

We are set down 80 miles within a River,…[a] channel so stored with Sturgion and other sweete Fishe as no mans fortune hath euer possessed the like…The soil is most fruitful, laden with Oake, ashe, Wallnut tree, Popler, Pine, sweet woods, Cedar and others yet with out names that yealds gumes pleasant as Franckumcense, and experience amongest us for great virtue in healing green wounds and aches.

Copy of a Letter from Virginia the Councell [sic] to the Councell [sic] of Virginia Here in England, June 22, 1607.
Early Settlement of Virginia and Virginiola…,
African American Perspectives, 1818-1907

By the summer of 1608, the colonists, driven to desperation by poor leadership, personal conflicts, and infighting, elected Smith president of the local council of the colony. Under his firm hand, the colony prospered. In 1609, Smith was injured in a gunpowder accident and forced to return to England.

In 1614, Captain Smith made a successful voyage to Maine and the Massachusetts Bay. With the approval of Prince Charles, he dubbed the region "New England" and mapped the coastline from Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod. Other colonizing and exploring ventures were hampered by pirates and bad weather. After 1617, Smith wrote extensively about his adventures in North America, but he never returned to Virginia or Massachusetts.

John Smith Memorial
Gamble Hill Park,
Richmond, Virginia,
between 1905 and 1920.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920

• Read Early Settlement of Virginia and Virginiola as Noticed by Poets and Players in the Time of Shakspeare. An account of Jamestown and the Virginia Company by nineteenth-century author Edward Duffield Niell, this history draws upon seventeenth-century English sources and letters. The text provides intriguing depictions of America from the viewpoint of the astonished Europeans, relates the squabbles of the Jamestown colonists, and includes references to plays and poems written on the theme of New World exploration. Although the poem attributed in this work to William Shakespeare is not currently regarded as his creation, excerpts from his play The Tempest indicate Shakespeare had read the account of the Virginia Company's shipwreck in the Bermuda Islands, briefly known as "Virginiola."
• Visit American Treasures of the Library of Congress to see gems from our nation's earliest days. Examine America's first book and the first complete Bible printed in America , published by Samuel Green in 1663. This bible is printed in the Algonquian language, translated from the English by missionary John Eliot as an aid him to his missionary efforts among Native Americans.
• View the online exhibition Religion and the Founding of the American Republic for an in-depth look at the role of religion in the creation and development of our nation.
• Search the collections on the keywords Virginia colony and Massachusetts colony to find photographs of historical sites commemorating the early history of the Virginia and Massachusetts Bay colonies.