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PREFACE AND
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The first attempt to present Capt. John Smith's works objectively and with
sympathetic understanding of their character was made by Edward Arber in
1884. Before that, and since the days of their original printing, only scattered
bits had been republished for one or another reason -- on occasion even
merely to disparage or glorify the man or what he wrote, depending on the
publisher's bent. Arber, perhaps spurred by the specific doubts raised in the
nineteenth century regarding Smith personally, collected and reprinted all
but one of the major works, and added thereto a considerable section
dedicated to contemporary writings relevant to Smith's career. This work,
entitled Captain John Smith ... Works, 1608-1631 (Birmingham, 1884), has now
served for a century as the basic edition of Smith. Its excellence, rather than
any want of assiduity on the part of more recent scholars, has certainly been
responsible for the lack of a later edition. Yet modern research soon made a
revision desirable, and that meant an edition that would supply such notes
and comments as would make Smith more fully understandable.
The present edition includes a transcription of Smith's letter to Francis
Bacon of 1618, which was omitted by Arber but constitutes the first draft of
Smith's New Englands Trials (1620). This latter in turn was reprinted with
additions in New Englands Trials (1622). Although the three versions are
identical in part, each later one contains added material, thereby providing
some insight into the development of Smith's plans for colonization.
Next, Arber omitted the Sea Grammar from his edition, presumably on the
grounds that it is a mere expansion of Smith's Accidence. In this case, however,
the omission is more serious than in that of the letter to Bacon. The material
Smith added to the Sea Grammar was taken, generally verbatim, from one of
the manuscript copies then circulating of Sir Henry Mainwaring's
"Dictionary of Sea Terms" (the title is variously phrased), which was not
printed until long after both Mainwaring and Smith were dead. Smith did
not outrightly copy Mainwaring's book, but he used it as a source for good
definitions of nautical terms that for the most part he had already published in
his Accidence, much as the present editor has used the Oxford English Dictionary
to explain obscure or obsolete words. The difference is that today we
acknowledge our debts to our sources, while in 1627 few borrowing writers
known to complain.
A third kind of omission was Arber's failure to see the importance of
passages in Samuel Purchas's Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes ...
(London, 1625), that contain excerpts from Smith's notes or to recognize the
importance of other documents in Purchas that add to our knowledge of
Smith, or in the case of the True Travels provide an earlier version of a later
work. Parenthetically, we may add that two poems by Smith have been
discovered recently in the form of published commendatory verses for books
by friends. These indirectly confirm Smith's authorship of the poem that
introduces the Advertisements.
In the case of the present editor, a fading memory of a visit to
Jamestown's 300th anniversary in 1907 persuaded him to return for the 350th
anniversary in 1957. This brought about renewed interest in Smith and the
acquisition of a copy of Arber. Finding that some details of southeastern
European geography that had perplexed Arber were quite simple to verify
through modern historical maps, the present editor undertook first an
explanatory article or two, and then deliberately set out to try his luck with a
biography of Smith based on known facts, illustrated with controlled flights of
imagination but virtually devoid of bald legend. At that point, he became
acquainted with Bradford Smith and his then recent Captain John Smith: His
Life and Legend (Philadelphia, 1953). There, in an appendix by Dr. Laura
Polanyi Striker, he found evidence of the first scholarly investigation into the
Hungarian and provincial Austrian sources.
To pass over extraneous details, the editor's training in linguistics and
experience as a newspaperman and intelligence officer had long since been
that of an investigator. Impartial investigations in European archives steadily
yielded circumstantial evidence in support of Smith's personal narratives,
making the biography in progress a fait accompli. But, more important, these
investigations aroused the interest of Dr. Lawrence W. Towner, then editor of
the William and Mary Quarterly, to the extent that the desirability of a new
edition of Smith's works was broached.
Arber's original edition had become scarce, as had even the reissue of
1895 and the reprint of 1910 with a new introduction by A. G. Bradley. Then,
there were the works omitted by Arber (the letter to Bacon, the Sea Grammar,
and the bits included as "Fragments" in Volume III of this edition), and
there was the need for annotation, including the results of the latest research
in many fields. Dr. Towner had already considered attacking the problem
singlehandedly, but early in 1960 he got in touch with the present editor with
the idea of joining forces. Due to other commitments on both parts, however,
nothing concrete resulted from our discussions.
Finally, in 1969, five years after the publication of the present editor's life
of Smith (The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith, Boston, 1964), the
Jamestown Foundation celebrated the 350th anniversary of the first Virginia
Lewis A. McMurran, Jr., privately approached the editor with his own
independent plan for publishing a complete and annotated edition of all
Smith's works, including those omitted by Arber, and proposed entrusting
this to the present editor. Agreement was soon reached. Dr. Towner (by then
occupied with the Newberry Library, of which he is now president and
librarian), willingly committed his dream to the present editor, and the
Jamestown Foundation (now the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation)
contributed the funds necessary for further research, as well as partial support
for publication. In this way, the editor was able to take charge by 1971.
Although many problems remained to be solved, thanks to the efforts of Lewis
McMurran and Lawrence Towner, the objective has become a reality. The
many others who have helped make this edition possible, in addition to these
"prime movers" (as Smith would have called them), are mentioned below.
A basic acknowledgment of debt to my forerunners in treating of John Smith's
works is meet and proper, even though a wide and deep chasm often divides
our aims and our conclusions. This chasm is the passage of time: the chronos of
Homer, from which we have formed the word "chronology." With the
passage of time, Smith's Elizabethan expansiveness became boasting within a
generation, and by 1850 was labeled "lying." Yet those critics who began
about 1850 to appraise Smith's work should be thanked, for ill informed
though they were, they opened the door to just evaluation.
My most lasting debt in connection with this work, however, is to those
who made its specific production possible. I therefore begin my acknowledgments
with those who have granted me the most practical aid.
Foremost of these is the National Endowment for the Humanities, to
which I express my hearty thanks for a grant in direct support of my research
in 1972, and, four years later, for a Folger Library-NEH Senior Fellowship
toward the same end, and in response to the need for study in greater depth of
several problems raised particularly by Smith's True Travels. Another
sponsor, already mentioned, is the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, heir to
the Jamestown Foundation, whose generosity has been of help to me
personally as well as to publication. And finally, two other sponsors have lent
their support in more ways than one: the Newberry Library, Chicago; and the
Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia.
They have been represented in part by an Advisory Board composed of the
Honorable Lewis A. McMurran, Jr., Professor David Beers Quinn, Parke
Rouse, Esq., Dr. Lawrence W. Towner, Dr. Wilcomb E. Washburn, and Dr.
David Woodward. To all of these I extend my sincerest appreciation for
advice and support. Dr. Thad W. Tate, director of the Institute of Early
American History and Culture, has been the principal administrator of the
project almost from its inception. His leadership has been essential to its
success. In addition, I wish to recognize the efforts on my behalf of the
Frederick Fausz, and Dr. Norman S. Fiering. Without their keen attention to
the minutiae that are encountered in such a work many flaws would not have
been detected. For the oversights and errors that remain, I alone am
responsible.
My debt is also great, however, to many other individuals and
organizations. In addition to those listed in my Three Worlds (xi-xiii) who
have since renewed their help, staff members in many previously unexplored
libraries and archives have cooperated in great ways and small. Two or three
sound scholars have remained skeptical (I would not want it otherwise), or
disagreed with this or that analysis; but I believe I can truthfully state that the
bulk of those whom I have consulted are in reasonable concord with the
interpretations I have advanced here and there where highly moot historical
questions are involved. Many of the results are to be found in the footnotes,
above all in Volume III.
Here then, in order to avoid a list of acknowledgments reminiscent of a
scholar's guide, I will single out a handful of scholars and archivists whose
personal opinions have in some way influenced my work on Smith during the
past five years. I am indebted particularly to Professor Quinn, already
mentioned, who has freely given me the benefit of his unequaled familiarity
with the entire period and area involved and thus has served as a welcome
mentor for the edition as a whole. On specific matters and in specific fields, I
am beholden to Dr. Franz Pichler, archivist in Graz, Austria; to the "Nicolae
Iorga" Institute of History, Bucharest, and especially to Dr. Maria Holban,
formerly of the staff of that institute; to the Topkapi Palace Archives and
Library, Istanbul, and especially Sayin Ibrahim Baybura; to Francis W.
Skeat, Esq., Fellow of the British Society of Master Glass Painters for advice
on heraldic matters; to Dr. Karl Pis̆ec', Maribor (Yugoslavia), for helping to
identify Smith's "Olumpagh"; to Professor Gustav Bayerle, Department of
Uralic and Altaic Languages, Indiana University, Bloomington, for
clarification of certain aspects of the "Long War" (1593-1606); to Dr.
Mehemet Kocakülah, graduate student at the University of Louisville
(Kentucky), for help with Turkish titles; and to the staff of the Folger
Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C., and its director, Dr. O. B.
Hardison. Many others are mentioned in the footnotes, in order to keep this
section within bounds.
In conclusion, I wish to acknowledge also the help of my associate and
assistant for thirty years, Wolfgang Rennert, whose work on the index was
interrupted by his sudden untimely death on March 2, 1977.
Williamsburg, Virginia, 1980
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