Did Pocahontas Save Captain John Smith?
Did Pocahontas Save Captain John Smith?

Author: J. A. Leo Lemay

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2010-06-01

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 0820336289

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By the mid-nineteenth century, Captain John Smith, the early colonial explorer and settler, was a well-known figure in American history. The story of how, in 1607, the Powhatan princess Pocahontas saved him from execution by her tribe appeared in all the standard American histories. Numerous plays, novels, and poems were devoted to the episode. Starting in the 1860s, however, scholars began to question Smith's published accounts of the Pocahontas incident, and a controversy ensued, with Henry Adams becoming Smith's most famous detractor. Today many scholars continue to regard Smith as a vainglorious braggart who lied about his rescue. J. A. Leo Lemay offers the first full analysis of the historiography of this debate. Examining all of the primary and secondary evidence, he persuasively demonstrates that the incident did in fact occur. A tightly argued study, Did Pocahontas Save Captain John Smith? not only refutes the outright skeptics; it effectively reverses the prevailing judgment that the truth will never be known.

Captain John Smith, Adventurer
Captain John Smith, Adventurer

Author: R. E. Pritchard

Publisher: Pen and Sword History

Published: 2020-07-30

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1526773635

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The swashbuckling life of the Elizabethan explorer and colonial governor is vividly recounted in this historical biography. Captain John Smith is best remembered for his association with Pocahontas, but this was only a small part of an extraordinary life filled with danger and adventure. As a soldier, he fought the Turks in Eastern Europe, where he beheaded three Turkish adversaries in duels. He was sold into slavery, then murdered his master to escape. He sailed under a pirate flag, was shipwrecked, and marched to the gallows to be hanged, only to be reprieved at the eleventh hour. All this before he was thirty years old. Smith was one of the founders of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America. He faced considerable danger from the Native Americans as well as from competing factions within the settlement itself. In the face of all this, Smith’s leadership saved the settlement from failure.

A Man Most Driven
A Man Most Driven

Author: Peter Firstbrook

Publisher: Oneworld Publications

Published: 2015-09-15

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 9781780747101

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He fought and beheaded three Turkish adversaries in duels. He was sold into slavery, then murdered his master to escape. He sailed under a pirate flag, was shipwrecked and marched to the gallows to be hanged, only to be reprieved at the eleventh hour. And all this happened before he was thirty years old. This is Captain John Smith’s life. Everyone knows the story of Pocahontas, and how in 1607 she saved John Smith. And were it not for Smith’s leadership, the Jamestown colony would surely have failed. Yet Smith was a far more ambitious explorer and soldier of fortune than these tales suggest – and a far more ambitious self-promoter, too. With A Man Most Driven, Firstbrook delivers a riveting, enlightening dissection of this myth-making man, England’s arrival on the world stage, and the creation of America.

The True Story of Pocahontas
The True Story of Pocahontas

Author:

Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing

Published: 2016-11-30

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 1555918670

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The True Story of Pocahontas is the first public publication of the Powhatan perspective that has been maintained and passed down from generation to generation within the Mattaponi Tribe, and the first written history of Pocahontas by her own people.

Love and Hate in Jamestown
Love and Hate in Jamestown

Author: David A. Price

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 030742670X

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A New York Times Notable Book and aSan Jose Mercury News Top 20 Nonfiction Book of 2003In 1606, approximately 105 British colonists sailed to America, seeking gold and a trade route to the Pacific. Instead, they found disease, hunger, and hostile natives. Ill prepared for such hardship, the men responded with incompetence and infighting; only the leadership of Captain John Smith averted doom for the first permanent English settlement in the New World.The Jamestown colony is one of the great survival stories of American history, and this book brings it fully to life for the first time. Drawing on extensive original documents, David A. Price paints intimate portraits of the major figures from the formidable monarch Chief Powhatan, to the resourceful but unpopular leader John Smith, to the spirited Pocahontas, who twice saved Smith’s life. He also gives a rare balanced view of relations between the settlers and the natives and debunks popular myths about the colony. This is a superb work of history, reminding us of the horrors and heroism that marked the dawning of our nation.

Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma
Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma

Author: Camilla Townsend

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2005-09-07

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1429930772

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Camilla Townsend's stunning new book, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, differs from all previous biographies of Pocahontas in capturing how similar seventeenth century Native Americans were--in the way they saw, understood, and struggled to control their world---not only to the invading British but to ourselves. Neither naïve nor innocent, Indians like Pocahontas and her father, the powerful king Powhatan, confronted the vast might of the English with sophistication, diplomacy, and violence. Indeed, Pocahontas's life is a testament to the subtle intelligence that Native Americans, always aware of their material disadvantages, brought against the military power of the colonizing English. Resistance, espionage, collaboration, deception: Pocahontas's life is here shown as a road map to Native American strategies of defiance exercised in the face of overwhelming odds and in the hope for a semblance of independence worth the name. Townsend's Pocahontas emerges--as a young child on the banks of the Chesapeake, an influential noblewoman visiting a struggling Jamestown, an English gentlewoman in London--for the first time in three-dimensions; allowing us to see and sympathize with her people as never before.

The American Dream of Captain John Smith
The American Dream of Captain John Smith

Author: Joseph A. Leo Lemay

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 9780813913216

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This book examines the character, writings, and ideals of Captain John Smith. Before sailing for Jamestown in 1607, Smith fought in two major European theatres of war, finally serving as captain of a Christian cavalry company in the Balkans fighting against the Turks. In America, he became early Virginia's most famous and feared Indian fighter. Powhatan himself testified that "if a twig but breake every one cryeth there commeth Captaine Smith". According to the author, Smith was also one of the 17th century's greatest political and social egalitarians and visionaries. His American Dream prefigured and contributed to the ideals that Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Joel Barlow, James Madison, and other founders of the American republic built into their aspirations for a new nation and new society. The author describes Smith as an explorer whose skill was unmatched in his time as well as a skilled diplomat and trader who treated the Indians fairly and with respect.