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TO THE READER;
And All Generous And Noble Adventurers
by Sea; And Well-Wishers to Navigation.
Especially The Masters,
Wardens, and Assistance of the
Trinity-House.
Worthy Readers:
How ever your perfections may censure my imperfections, I
know not, my greatest error in this is but a desire to do good, which
disease hathever haunted mee since my child-hood, and all the
miseries and ingratitudes I have indured, cannot yet divert me from
that resolution: As both Europe, Asia, Affri- ∥ ca, and America can
partly witnesse, if all their extremities hathtaught me any thing, I
have not kept it for my owne particuler, I know well I am blamed
for not concealing that, that time and occasion hathtaught mee to
reveale, as at large you may read in the life of Sigismundus Bathor,
Prince of Transilvania, writ by his Secretary Francisco Fernezsa.
New Englands Trialls With the Generall History of Virginia, New
England, and the Summer Isles, that the most of those faire plantations
did spring from the fruites of my adventers and discoveries is
evident, although their returnes as yet doth not answere the worlds
expectation, nor my desire; yet how they have proceeded every yeare
since their first originall, to this present, by the Maps therein, you
may plainly see the Discriptions of the Countries by the Story, what
they are, what good they might be to this Kingdome, how they have
bin used and abused, how the defects might be amended, the
Planters made happy, God and the King well pleased and served,
and all the Honorable and worthy Adventurers contented: Whatsoever
malice or ignorance can feigne to the contrary, ∥ for this small
long, more largely to explaine the particulers: So I rest,
4. "Assistance" here means "Assistants." Trinity began as a medieval fraternity of
seamen and pilots. Located at Deptford near the mouth of the Thames, it developed a
special responsibility for the training of Thames pilots and the charting of the river.
Henry VIII gave it a charter c. 1514, which conferred on it some authority in arbitrating
maritime disputes. It exerted considerable influence on coastal navigation,
especially pilotage.
5. For discussion of the numerous questions surrounding Smith's reference to this
biography of Zsigmund Báthory, see the editor's Introduction to Fragment J, below. In
the present text, the sentence immediately following "Fernezsa" is garbled, but Smith
seems to mean simply that readers of New Englands Trials and of the Generall Historie will
get the true story about Smith's contributions to New World colonization.
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