John Smith Jamestown Quotes

Jamestown military leader John Smith threatened to kill all the women and children if the Powhatan leaders would not feed and clothe the settlers as well as provide them with land and labor.

Subtract everything inessential from America and what's left? Geography and political philosophy, V says. The Declaration of Independence and Constitution. The Federalist Papers. --I'd say geography and mythology, James says. Our legends. He gives examples, talks about Columbus sailing past the edge of the world, John Smith at Jamestown and Puritans at Plymouth Rock, conquering the howling wilderness. Benjamin Franklin going from rags to riches with the help of a little slave trading, Frederick Douglass escaping to freedom, the assassination of Lincoln, annexing the West, All those stories that tell us who we are---stories of exploration, freedom, slavery, and always violence. We keep clutching those things, or at least worn-out images of them, like idols we can't quit worshipping.

John Smith, for one, knew the value of good food during an ocean voyage. The want of good food, he said, “occasions the losse of more men, then in any English fleet hath bin slaine in any fight since 1588.”8 Smith was not exaggerating. Scurvy, a terrible wasting disease caused by a lack of vitamin C, wreaked havoc on crews during long ocean voyages. Symptoms often appeared within weeks of leaving port as men complained of weakness and a feeling of general malaise. Soon bleeding was seen around hair follicles on the arms and legs and around rapidly loosening teeth. As the illness progressed, skin was discolored by large purple bruises that often became open sores. In the worst cases, old wounds that seemed to be healed reopened. Eventually sufferers died screaming in agony.

Now Archer and Ratcliffe and, to a lesser degree, John Martin, another of the original settlers whose laziness had angered Smith in the colony’s early days, and who had departed in 1608 only to return on the Falcon, all saw their chance to repay Smith for his cheek by stripping him of his office. Of course, Smith was not about to give up without a fight. He said, with justification, that since the colony’s new leaders and the new charter authorizing the change in leadership were somewhere out on the Atlantic (or at its bottom), there was neither need nor authority for him to give up his post. And he certainly did not want to turn the leadership of the colony over to men he knew were ill suited to guarantee its safety or survival. For his part, if Smith had known what lay in store in the next few weeks, he might well have simply thrown up his hands and ceded control to the men he found so distasteful. As it was, at one point, he said he would give up his commission to Martin, a man he apparently found slightly less offensive than Ratcliffe and Archer. Martin accepted, but kept the job for only three hours before deciding the responsibility was more than he wanted to shoulder and turning the task back to Smith. As much as Smith disliked Ratcliffe, Archer, and Martin, he felt no better when he surveyed the new settlers dispatched by the Virginia Company. They were, in Smith’s view, a pretty sorry lot.

Still, John Smith knew he had to have backing if he was to lead the colony successfully even for a few weeks. He would have deeply felt his responsibility to both the four hundred or so newcomers who had survived the hurricane as well as the approximately two hundred already living in Jamestown when the remnants of the 1609 fleet arrived.

In reality, Smith, the man of action who had won respect as a soldier in Europe, would not have had to expend much in the way of bribes or feasting to earn the mariners’ support. They certainly knew they had a better chance of surviving long enough to reboard their ships for the return voyage to England by following John Smith’s lead than by throwing their lot in with Archer, Ratcliffe, or John Martin. Whether by bribery or, more likely, simply by dint of his personality, Smith quickly garnered enough support to convince his opposition to leave him in control of the colony. With as much good grace as his enemies could muster, which was not much, they allowed Smith to remain in office as their soon-to-be-replaced leader.

By this time, Wahunsonacock (Powhatan) and his people all along the Chesapeake were fully aware of the arrival of the hundreds of settlers on board the ships that rode at anchor off Jamestown. The paramount chief, while not privy to the plans that had been made in London, was savvy enough to know in his bones that the occupation of his lands and the threat to his rule—his very survival and that of his people—had been ratcheted to a new level. Thanks to his spies close to the colony and to several colonists who abandoned the settlement to take shelter with the natives, he also knew that the settlement was once again short of food and, even more important, that John Smith’s rule was under attack from within. Since his first meeting with Smith, the old chief had known Smith was the colonist most worthy of respect and fear. Now less fearful of the short, red-bearded captain than at any time since that first meeting, Wahunsonacock determined to abandon his policy of more or less peaceful coexistence and to do what was needed to force the coat-wearing people from his lands once and for all or to force them to submit to his rule.

At the same time, Smith decided that the best way, indeed the only way, to guarantee Jamestown’s future was to disperse settlers. In making this decision, he was taking a page out of the Indians’ playbook since the Powhatan people routinely broke into small groups when food was scarce so that they could better forage and live off the land. Smith opted to send about sixty colonists downriver under the leadership of John Martin and George Percy (two of the men he counted as enemies). At the same time, he dispatched roughly 130 colonists up the James to a spot near the village of Powhatan, ruled by Wahunsonacock’s son, Parahunt. This group he placed under the leadership of Francis West, whose only claim to leadership was that he was the twenty-three-year-old younger brother of Thomas West, Lord De La Warre, the man who had been named “governor for life” of the Virginia colony, and who was expected to arrive in Jamestown at almost any time. These groups, Smith believed, would be able to trade for supplies and live off the land, enabling those who remained in Jamestown to survive the fast approaching winter. Smith, as well as the men who left the protection of the settlement to live off the land, were unaware that Wahunsonacock was no longer willing even to feign friendship

Captain John Smith, who had taken the colony’s reins in September 1608, was fully able to continue leading and he was entitled, under the terms of the original charter, to hold the office for a full year, or until September 10, 1609. However, several settlers, men who saw themselves assuming the leadership of the settlement, had other ideas. This group was almost certainly led by two of the colony’s original settlers who had left the colony only to return in the fleet of 1609. One of the two was Gabriel Archer, the Blessing passenger who wrote about conditions on the vessel in the hurricane. His right-hand man was John Sicklemore, a settler who, for reasons no one has ever been able to determine, used the alias John Ratcliffe. These two men soundly despised Smith—a feeling he returned in kind. Now, they saw an opportunity to supplant Smith as the colony’s leader or, at the very least, to force him to step down in accordance with the terms of the new charter.

The bad blood that pitted Archer and Ratcliffe against Smith had its beginnings in 1607, in Jamestown’s earliest days, when the three men served together on the colony’s ruling council. In the months when colonists were dying of hunger and illness, Smith discovered that the duo, along with a few others, were planning to steal supplies and a small boat they could use to flee Virginia for the safety of England. While Smith would almost certainly have been happy to see the last of the two men he thought of as cowards and traitors, he knew the colony could not survive without the boat and that the supplies the men were about to steal were sorely needed by the hungry colonists. Smith, in typical John Smith fashion, soon spiked those plans when he ordered several of the settlement’s cannon turned on the boat and ordered those on board to come ashore or be shot out of the water. Neither Archer nor Ratcliffe was the type of man to take such effrontery lying down, especially from a man they would have considered their social inferior. A few weeks later, the two saw an opportunity to even the score. At that time (it was after Smith’s rescue by Pocahontas, when he returned to Jamestown), Archer and Ratcliffe used the Bible as a legal text and charged Smith with murder under Levitical law. Ludicrous as it seems, the two argued that the “eye for an eye” verse made Smith responsible for the deaths of two of his men who had been killed when Smith was captured by the Powhatan people. It is a measure of Smith’s unpopularity with the “better sort” of colonists (not only Ratcliffe and Archer) that he was—within hours of his return to Jamestown—charged, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to die, with the execution scheduled for the next morning. That night (it was in early 1608), Smith was saved from death when Captain Christopher Newport, the man who later served as the Sea Venture’s captain, unexpectedly sailed up to Jamestown with a handful of new colonists and a shipload of food and other supplies. Newport, who recognized Smith’s value to the colony even if some of the other leaders did not and who, no doubt, saw the idiocy of making Smith responsible for the death of the men who had been killed by the Indians, immediately ordered him freed and all charges against him dropped.

In both colonies the communistic experiments were failures. Angry at the lazy men in Jamestown who idled their time away and yet expected regular meals, Captain John Smith issued a manifesto: "Everyone that gathereth not every day as much as I do, the next day shall be set beyond the river and forever banished from the fort and live there or starve." Even this terrible threat did not bring a change in production. Not until each man was given a plot of his own to till, not until each gathered the fruits of his own labor, did the colony prosper. In

In mid-1608, or at about the time that Strachey started thinking of emigrating, Captain John Smith, the Virginia settler, had written a long letter to a friend about conditions in Jamestown.

Captain John Smith, the “president” of the colony during much of its earliest history, regularly complained of the quality of those sent to establish the settlement. The colony, he said, would have been better off if the company in London had sent “one hundred good labourers (in place of) a thousand such Gallants as were sent me, that would doe nothing but complaine, curse, and despaire.”15

The state of New Hampshire boasts a mere eighteen miles of Atlantic Ocean coastline. The Piscataqua River separates the state's southeastern corner from Maine and empties into the Atlantic. On the southwestern corner of this juncture of river and ocean is Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The smaller town of Kittery, Maine, is on the opposite side of the river. The port of Piscataqua is deep, and it never freezes in winter, making it an ideal location for maritime vocations such as fishing, sea trade, and shipbuilding. Four years before the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1603, Martin Pring of England first discovered the natural virtues of Piscataqua harbor. While on a scouting voyage in the ship Speedwell, Pring sailed approximately ten miles up the unexplored Piscataqua, where he discovered “goodly groves and woods replenished with tall oakes, beeches, pine-trees, firre-trees, hasels, and maples.”1 Following Pring, Samuel de Champlain, Captain John Smith, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges each sailed along the Maine-New Hampshire coastline and remarked on its abundance of timber and fish. The first account of Piscataqua harbor was given by Smith, that intrepid explorer, author, and cofounder of the Jamestown settlement, who assigned the name “New-England” to the northeast coastline in 1614. In May or June of that year, he landed near the Piscataqua, which he later described as “a safe harbour, with a rocky shore.”2 In 1623, three years after the Pilgrim founding of Plymouth, an English fishing and trading company headed by David Thomson established a saltworks and fishing station in what is now Rye, New Hampshire, just west of the Piscataqua River. English fishermen soon flocked to the Maine and New Hampshire coastline, eventually venturing inland to dry their nets, salt, and fish. They were particularly drawn to the large cod population around the Piscataqua, as in winter the cod-spawning grounds shifted from the cold offshore banks to the warmer waters along the coast.