Brief Notes on the
Continuation of the Generall Historie
Perhaps the best and the most that can be said of chapters 21 through 27 is
that they show John Smith's continuing interest in English overseas colonization.
In this section, he ventures to give, in turn, such bits of new information
as he had about Virginia, Bermuda, and New England in North
America, and he shows renewed interest in Guiana and an Amazonian
project in South America, as well as in three budding West Indian colonies.
But the overseas empire was growing too rapidly, in too many directions, for
Smith to maintain easy contacts with all of the venturers, and he was getting
old. He assembled and passed on what he collected, possibly on the insistence
of his publisher, Thomas Slater, or at the appeal of John Haviland, his loyal
printer. Yet the story is humdrum, the writing apathetic. Then, apparently
all of a sudden, an idea came to Smith: the miserable pirates that infest the
seas. In a final burst of eloquence, John Smith found a subject fit for his pen
and appropriate for a prayer to his God and a salute to his king.
