Captain John Smith returned to England in the autumn of 1609, woundedin body and loaded with accusations of misconduct, concocted by hisfactious companions in Virginia. There is no record that thesecharges were ever considered by the London Company. Indeed, wecannot find that the company in those days ever took any action onthe charges made against any of its servants in Virginia. Men camehome in disgrace and appeared to receive neither vindication norcondemnation. Some sunk into private life, and others more pushingand brazen, like Ratcliffe, the enemy of Smith, got employment againafter a time. The affairs of the company seem to have been conductedwith little order or justice.

　　Whatever may have been the justice of the charges against Smith, hehad evidently forfeited the good opinion of the company as adesirable man to employ. They might esteem his energy and profit byhis advice and experience, but they did not want his services. Andin time he came to be considered an enemy of the company.

　　Unfortunately for biographical purposes, Smith's life is pretty mucha blank from 1609 to 1614. When he ceases to write about himself hepasses out of sight. There are scarcely any contemporary allusionsto his existence at this time. We may assume, however, from ourknowledge of his restlessness, ambition, and love of adventure, thathe was not idle. We may assume that he besieged the company with hisplans for the proper conduct of the settlement of Virginia; that hetalked at large in all companies of his discoveries, his exploits,which grew by the relating, and of the prospective greatness of thenew Britain beyond the Atlantic. That he wearied the Council by hisimportunity and his acquaintances by his hobby, we can also surmise.

　　No doubt also he was considered a fanatic by those who failed tocomprehend the greatness of his schemes, and to realize, as he did,the importance of securing the new empire to the English before itwas occupied by the Spanish and the French. His conceit, hisboasting, and his overbearing manner, which no doubt was one of thecauses why he was unable to act in harmony with the other adventurersof that day, all told against him. He was that most uncomfortableperson, a man conscious of his own importance, and out of favor andout of money.

　　Yet Smith had friends, and followers, and men who believed in him.

　　This is shown by the remarkable eulogies in verse from many pens,which he prefixes to the various editions of his many works. Theyseem to have been written after reading the manuscripts, and preparedto accompany the printed volumes and tracts. They all allude to theenvy and detraction to which he was subject, and which must haveamounted to a storm of abuse and perhaps ridicule; and they all taxthe English vocabulary to extol Smith, his deeds, and his works. Inputting forward these tributes of admiration and affection, as wellas in his constant allusion to the ill requital of his services, wesee a man fighting for his reputation, and conscious of the necessityof doing so. He is ever turning back, in whatever he writes, torehearse his exploits and to defend his motives.

　　The London to which Smith returned was the London of Shakespeare'sday; a city dirty, with ill-paved streets unlighted at night, nosidewalks, foul gutters, wooden houses, gable ends to the street, setthickly with small windows from which slops and refuse were at anymoment of the day or night liable to be emptied upon the heads of thepassers by; petty little shops in which were beginning to bedisplayed the silks and luxuries of the continent; a city crowded andgrowing rapidly, subject to pestilences and liable to sweepingconflagrations. The Thames had no bridges, and hundreds of boatsplied between London side and Southwark, where were most of thetheatres, the bull-baitings, the bear-fighting, the public gardens,the residences of the hussies, and other amusements that Bankside,the resort of all classes bent on pleasure, furnished high or low.

　　At no time before or since was there such fantastical fashion indress, both in cut and gay colors, nor more sumptuousness in costumeor luxury in display among the upper classes, and such squalor in lowlife. The press teemed with tracts and pamphlets, written inlanguage "as plain as a pikestaff," against the immoralities of thetheatres, those "seminaries of vice," and calling down the judgmentof God upon the cost and the monstrosities of the dress of both menand women; while the town roared on its way, warned by sermons, andinstructed in its chosen path by such plays and masques as BenJonson's "Pleasure reconciled to Virtue."The town swarmed with idlers, and with gallants who wantedadvancement but were unwilling to adventure their ease to obtain it.

　　There was much lounging in apothecaries' shops to smoke tobacco,gossip, and hear the news. We may be sure that Smith found manyauditors for his adventures and his complaints. There was a gooddeal of interest in the New World, but mainly still as a place wheregold and other wealth might be got without much labor, and as apossible short cut to the South Sea and Cathay. The vast number ofLondoners whose names appear in the second Virginia charter shows thereadiness of traders to seek profit in adventure. The stir for widerfreedom in religion and government increased with the activity ofexploration and colonization, and one reason why James finallyannulled the Virginia, charter was because he regarded the meetingsof the London Company as opportunities of sedition.

　　Smith is altogether silent about his existence at this time. We donot hear of him till 1612, when his "Map of Virginia" with hisdescription of the country was published at Oxford. The map had beenpublished before: it was sent home with at least a portion of thedescription of Virginia. In an appendix appeared (as has been said)a series of narrations of Smith's exploits, covering the rime he wasin Virginia, written by his companions, edited by his friend Dr.

　　Symonds, and carefully overlooked by himself.

　　Failing to obtain employment by the Virginia company, Smith turnedhis attention to New England, but neither did the Plymouth companyavail themselves of his service. At last in 1614 he persuaded someLondon merchants to fit him out for a private trading adventure tothe coast of New England. Accordingly with two ships, at the chargeof Captain Marmaduke Roydon, Captain George Langam, Mr. John Buley,and William Skelton, merchants, he sailed from the Downs on the 3d ofMarch, 1614, and in the latter part of April "chanced to arrive inNew England, a part of America at the Isle of Monahiggan in 43 1/2 ofNortherly latitude." This was within the territory appropriated tothe second (the Plymouth) colony by the patent of 1606, which gaveleave of settlement between the 38th and 44th parallels.

　　Smith's connection with New England is very slight, and mainly thatof an author, one who labored for many years to excite interest in itby his writings. He named several points, and made a map of suchportion of the coast as he saw, which was changed from time to timeby other observations. He had a remarkable eye for topography, as isespecially evident by his map of Virginia. This New England coast isroughly indicated in Venazzani's Plot Of 1524, and better onMercator's of a few years later, and in Ortelius's "Theatrum OrbisTerarum" of 1570; but in Smith's map we have for the first time afair approach to the real contour.

　　Of Smith's English predecessors on this coast there is no room hereto speak. Gosnold had described Elizabeth's Isles, explorations andsettlements had been made on the coast of Maine by Popham andWeymouth, but Smith claims the credit of not only drawing the firstfair map of the coast, but of giving the name "New England" to whathad passed under the general names of Virginia, Canada, Norumbaga,etc.

　　Smith published his description of New England June 18, 1616, and itis in that we must follow his career. It is dedicated to the "high,hopeful Charles, Prince of Great Britain," and is prefaced by anaddress to the King's Council for all the plantations, and another toall the adventurers into New England. The addresses, as usual, callattention to his own merits. "Little honey [he writes] hath thathive, where there are more drones than bees; and miserable is thatland where more are idle than are well employed. If the endeavors ofthese vermin be acceptable, I hope mine may be excusable: though Iconfess it were more proper for me to be doing what I say thanwriting what I know. Had I returned rich I could not have erred; nowhaving only such food as came to my net, I must be taxed. But, Iwould my taxers were as ready to adventure their purses as I, purse,life, and all I have; or as diligent to permit the charge, as I knowthey are vigilant to reap the fruits of my labors." The value of thefisheries he had demonstrated by his catch; and he says, looking, asusual, to large results, "but because I speak so much of fishing, ifany mistake me for such a devote fisher, as I dream of nought else,they mistake me. I know a ring of gold from a grain of barley as wellas a goldsmith; and nothing is there to be had which fishing dothhinder, but further us to obtain."John Smith first appears on the New England coast as a whale fisher.

　　The only reference to his being in America in Josselyn's"Chronological Observations of America" is under the wrong year,1608: "Capt. John Smith fished now for whales at Monhiggen." Hesays: "Our plot there was to take whales, and made tryall of a Myneof gold and copper;" these failing they were to get fish and furs.

　　Of gold there had been little expectation, and (he goes on) "we foundthis whale fishing a costly conclusion; we saw many, and spent muchtime in chasing them; but could not kill any; they being a kind ofJubartes, and not the whale that yeeldes finnes and oyle as weexpected." They then turned their attention to smaller fish, butowing to their late arrival and "long lingering about the whale"--chasing a whale that they could not kill because it was not the rightkind--the best season for fishing was passed. Nevertheless, theysecured some 40,000 cod--the figure is naturally raised to 60,000when Smith retells the story fifteen years afterwards.

　　But our hero was a born explorer, and could not be content with notexamining the strange coast upon which he found himself. Leaving hissailors to catch cod, he took eight or nine men in a small boat, andcruised along the coast, trading wherever he could for furs, of whichhe obtained above a thousand beaver skins; but his chance to tradewas limited by the French settlements in the east, by the presence ofone of Popham's ships opposite Monhegan, on the main, and by a coupleof French vessels to the westward. Having examined the coast fromPenobscot to Cape Cod, and gathered a profitable harvest from thesea, Smith returned in his vessel, reaching the Downs within sixmonths after his departure. This was his whole experience in NewEngland, which ever afterwards he regarded as particularly hisdiscovery, and spoke of as one of his children, Virginia being theother.

　　With the other vessel Smith had trouble. He accuses its master,Thomas Hunt, of attempting to rob him of his plots and observations,and to leave him "alone on a desolate isle, to the fury of famine,And all other extremities." After Smith's departure the rascallyHunt decoyed twenty-seven unsuspecting savages on board his ship andcarried them off to Spain, where he sold them as slaves. Hunt soldhis furs at a great profit. Smith's cargo also paid well: in hisletter to Lord Bacon in 1618 he says that with forty-five men he hadcleared L 1,500 in less than three months on a cargo of dried fishand beaver skins--a pound at that date had five times the purchasingpower of a pound now.

　　The explorer first landed on Monhegan, a small island in sight ofwhich in the war of 1812 occurred the lively little seafight of theAmerican Wasp and the British Frolic, in which the Wasp was thevictor, but directly after, with her prize, fell into the hands of anEnglish seventy-four.

　　He made certainly a most remarkable voyage in his open boat. BetweenPenobscot and Cape Cod (which he called Cape James) he says he sawforty several habitations, and sounded about twenty-five excellentharbors. Although Smith accepted the geographical notion of histime, and thought that Florida adjoined India, he declared thatVirginia was not an island, but part of a great continent, and hecomprehended something of the vastness of the country he was coastingalong, "dominions which stretch themselves into the main, God dothknow how many thousand miles, of which one could no more guess theextent and products than a ............