Happy holidays to all.
No more blogs till after January 1, 2017!
Saturday, December 10, 2016
Saturday, November 19, 2016
Thanksgiving Memories
As you eat your Thanksgiving turkey, remember that the Susan Constant got here long before the Mayflower. Happy Thanksgiving!
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Saturday, October 22, 2016
Lady Frances and Captain Smith in the 1630s. Who knows?
John Smith died on June 21, 1631. His burial place
is in the south aisle of Saint Sepulchre-without-Newgate
Church, Holborn Viaduct, London. The church is the largest parish church in the
City of London, dating from 1137.
Captain John Smith's life is memorialized by a fine stained- glass window in the
south wall of the church.
Who
ordered his burial? Who commanded the memorial window?
Lady
Frances kept the title Duchess of Richmond until her death on October 8, 1639.
She is buried in Westminster
Abbey next to her third husband, in the
tomb she had designed in his memory.
Mysteries upon mysteries.
Saturday, September 24, 2016
John Smith and Lady Frances
Portrait of Lady Frances, Countess of Hertford, in 1611.
How
well did she know John Smith?
Her
husband, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, was Smith’s “best friend.” The Earl died
at age 81 on April 6, 1621. Lady Frances was then 43 years old. John Smith was 41.
A wealthy widow, Frances nonetheless wasted no time in attaching herself to a
new husband: Just two months after
Edward died, Frances married a 47-year-old Scottish nobleman, Ludovic Stewart, 2nd
Duke of Lennox. He was a cousin of King James I. A member of the Privy Council,
he was also Steward of the Royal Household. Steward became Earl of Newcastle
upon Tyne and Duke of Richmond on August 17, 1623, but did not enjoy those
titles very long. He died at age 50 in his bed (of a heart attack?) at
Whitehall on the morning of February 16, 1624. As his widow, Lady Frances, now
wealthier than ever, became known as the “Double Duchess.”
On
July 12, 1624 John Smith’s monumental Generall
Historie of Virginia, New-England and the Summer Isles was published. It
was dedicated To the Illustrious and Most
Noble Princesse, the Lady Francis, Duchesse of Richmond and Lenox. A 1623 engraving of her image was bound
into the original edition.
Lady Frances
financed John Smith’s book.
Saturday, August 27, 2016
More John Smith Mysteries
John Smith, like many other Englishmen who came
to Jamestown in 1607, nearly died there. Critically wounded in the mysterious
gunpowder accident in 1609, he had little choice but to return to England.
Where he stayed, and what he did then, remain
mysteries with few clues.
· After
his return to England, Smith put together his book, A Map of Virginia, which
was published in 1612 and dedicated “To the right honorable Sir Edward Semer
Knight, Baron Beauchamp, and Earle of Hartford.”
· The
dedication is in two surviving copies of Smith’s historic book. One of the
copies, now in the New York Public Library, belonged to Edward Seymour.
· In
the dedication, Smith writes: “It is the best gift I can give to the best
friend I have. l . . In the
harbour of your Lordships favour, I hope I ever shall rest secure . . . .
Did Smith, recovering from his wound, and
writing his book, stay with Seymour from 1609 to 1612--and after?
· One
of Seymour’s properties was Hertford House, a London town house on Cannon Row
in Westminster.
Edward Seymour was a nephew of Jane Seymour,
the third wife of Henry VIII
The earl’s wife was Frances Howard, a great
beauty. She was 34 years old in 1612. John Smith was 32.
Frances’s husband was 39 years older than she.
He was 73 in 1612.
Pity that Frances did not keep a diary.
Saturday, July 16, 2016
Summer at Jamestown --and elsewhere
James River
Summertime at Jamestown, 1606
Summertime in Houston, 2016
Look for more blogs in August!
Saturday, July 2, 2016
Summer at Jamestown, July 1607: Some good news, some bad.
The
first summer at Jamestown, July 1607
In
the journal kept by the colony’s first president, Edward Wingfield, on July 3,
1607 there was some good news, and some not so good:
Seven or eight Indians
presented President Wingfield with a Dear (sic).”
About this tyme divers (sic) of our men fell sick.”
And some of them died.
Saturday, June 25, 2016
Summertime, Jamestown 1607: No vacation!
Having a hot summer?
Think
of the English at Jamestown, summer 1607:
There was
back-breaking, hand-blistering labor to do as soon as they had picked a
place—marshy and unhealthy, as it turned out--to settle. Sailing more than
thirty miles up the wide river that they named the James after King James I,
they chose a small, wooded peninsula about two miles long and a mile to a mile
and a half wide. It was actually an island, separated from the mainland by a
shallow creek, but the James River was six fathoms [36 feet], deep enough to moor
their ships a stone’s throw from the shore.
By June 15, seven weeks after they
arrived, 104 men and boys (one man had died on the voyage) had finished an
enormous task: They had built a fort at the site they called Jamestown. Working
and sweating in the hot Virginia sun, they dug over 1,600 feet of trenches
nearly three feet deep to form a huge triangle by the river’s edge. They
chopped down hundreds of pine and oak and elm trees. They dragged heavy logs of
up to one foot in diameter, one by one, to set vertically in the trenches to
make a palisade with walls eleven to fifteen feet high. When it was finished,
the fort by the river covered about an acre and a half, or roughly the area of
two football fields. It was 140 yards long on the side facing the river, and
100 yards on each of the other two sides. With guns mounted at each angle and
only one entrance, a massive log gate on the side facing the river, this
palisaded fort would be a comforting defense against invaders—either Indian or
Spanish.
Invaders would be the least of their worries.
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Saturday, May 28, 2016
Pocahontas: What’s in a Name?
Donald
Trump recently called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas,” a name that is offensive in some usages
to Native Americans, especially women. Every school child in America knows who
Pocahontas was, bur not many know her other names.
When
John Smith met her in 1608, she was a little girl of ten or so. “Pocahontas” was her nickname. It meant “Little Mischief.” Her real name was “Matoaka,” an Algonquin Indian name of unknown
meaning. It has been said to mean “Bright Stream between the Hills,” or “One Who Kindles,” but who knows? The first record of
it is in a letter by a Virginia colonist in 1614, when she married another
colonist, John Rolfe. If, as some have suggested, “Matoaka” was Pocahontas’s secret name, kept secret by a “superstitious fear of hurt by the
English,” (Samuel Purchas, 1625), we have no proof that this was
so. If Pocahontas’s secret name might cause the English to harm her, why did
she let it appear in A True Discourse of
the Present State of Virginia, a public relations tract put out by the
Virginia Company in 1615?
Her
other name was Rebecca, given her when she was baptized as a Christian in 1614.
Saturday, May 14, 2016
Jamestown: "Savages" and "Foreigners" meet.
Four
hundred and nine years ago this month, in May 1607, a small group of Englishmen
exploring Virginia met an Indian werowance (or chief). This werowance had
invited them to visit him, and he came out to meet them. One of the Englishmen,
George Percy, wrote that this chief wore “a crown of deer’s
hair colored red in fashion of a rose fastened about his knot of hair, and a
great plate of copper on the other side of his head, with two long feathers in
fashion of a pair of horns placed in the middle of his crown, his body was painted
all with crimson, with a chain of beads about his neck, his face painted blue,
besprinkled with silver ore as we thought, his ears all behung with bracelets
of pearl, and in either ear a bird’s claw through it beset with fine copper or
gold. . . .”
--George
Percy, “Observations . . . in Virginia
. . . 1606.
Besides
that, this werowance was walking to meet them and playing a flute made of a
reed.
Seventeenth-century
Englishmen weren’t the only ones who liked ceremonies and dressed elaborately. Yet
the English colonists called the Indians “savages.”
The
Indians, more politely, called the English “foreigners.”
Saturday, May 7, 2016
Jamestowne Talk
Giving a talk for the Jamestowne Society today about JAMESTOWN: THE NOVEL.
"From History to Fiction--and Back."
More about John Smith to come.
"From History to Fiction--and Back."
More about John Smith to come.
Saturday, April 30, 2016
John Smith writes a "tell all" book about Jamestown.
To begin, John Smith put together a small book called A Map of Virginia. Friends and comrades who had been in Virginia with him and who had seen what happened there after he left wrote part of it, and, as Smith’s biographer and editor, Philip Barbour, said, “Together they wrote the book telling their side of the story, and apparently against the wishes of the Virginia Company together they got it printed in Oxford. . . .” There was nothing the Virginia Company could do about it.
One of the most important books about Virginia ever printed, it contains, as the title promises, a historic map, with Smith’s incomparable description of “the Country, the Commodities, People, Government, and Religion.” But it also contains a narrative of the “Proceedings” of the colony from the voyage of the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery in 1606 to the death of Sir George Somers in Bermuda in 1609. Here, for all of England to read, were firsthand accounts of the explorations, the confrontations with the Indians, the diseases and disasters, and the Starving Time with all its horrors. George Percy, newly returned from Virginia in the fall of 1612, must have been furious. He did not produce his narrative until 1625, and it was not published in his lifetime. A Map of Virginia made another account superfluous.
In 1624, John Smith would publish his masterpiece, The General History of Virginia.
How truthful was John Smith?
Saturday, April 23, 2016
“A book with the truth set down....”
Francis’s brother Thomas West, Lord de La Warr, was scheduled to sail soon with a massive relief expedition for the beleaguered Virginia
colony: over a thousand colonists and ample
supplies for them and the survivors at Jamestown. But he
would be sailing
without Captain John Smith, whose gunpowder wound would keep him out of commission for as much as a year.
Even now, after four months, theslightest exertion exhausted him;
the smallest movement of his right
leg pained him.
For the time being,
at least, Smith
knew that he would have to be relegated to another, lesser
role in the affairs of the colony so dear to his heart.
“What will you do now?”
Sir Thomas asked
as the two sipped their
liquor. Smith studied
the liquid in his cup.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“No man in England
knows more about
Virginia than you do,” Sir Thomas said. “Why don’t you write
something? God knows,
the Company needs all the help it can get.
A book with the truth
set down would
be very useful indeed.”
--Jamestown: The Novel
Saturday, April 16, 2016
Smith vs. Smythe, London 1610, continued...
And so, for the next hour, John Smith
told Thomas Smythe of what had transpired in Virginia, of the discord
and factions, of the troubles
with the Indians,
of the plots against his
life.
“I have read Archer’s
and Ratcliffe’s letters,” Sir Thomas said, tapping
his fingers thoughtfully on the polished surface of the table in front of him. “Archer says you sided with the sailors
and refused to surrender your
commission as president; Ratcliffe says you were high-handed, and—how did he put it? You ‘were sent home to answer some misdemeanors.’ ” From the tone of voice, Smith
could not tell what his host was thinking.
Suddenly, Sir Thomas
looked up and smiled. “And I say Archer’s a rumormonger and Ratcliffe’s a bastard.
Have some aqua vitae.”
Relief, like a warm, welcome bath, washed over John Smith.
His frail, ravaged body straightened slightly; his awful wound felt as if someone had spread a healing balm over it. He was not,
then, out of favor with the Virginia Company Council.
He knew he was not at fault; he had followed
his own best judgment and had written
in his own defense, but he was,
after all, only the son of a yeoman farmer in Willoughby, Lincolnshire, and the men he
dealt with were the sons of old, distinguished families. Francis West and his brother Thomas, Virginia’s future governor,
were first cousins
twice removed to the late Queen
of England, and John Smith
had made an implacable enemy of Francis West.
from Jamestown: The
Novel
Saturday, April 9, 2016
Smith vs. Smythe, London, 1610
John Smith’s interview in London,
continued:
Ah, Captain Smith!
How are you?” Sir Thomas strode
into the hall,
his wine-colored velvet robe sweeping behind him.
“Not so well
as I’d like, or as I’d hoped
to be by now,” Smith said.
He planned to proceed cautiously, not knowing what conflicting reports
had reached the man who
stood smiling before
him. Thomas Smythe,
treasurer of the Virginia Company, member
of the Haberdashers’ and Skinners’ Companies, the
Levant Company, and at one time governor of the Muscovy
Company, was also a member of one of the richest
merchant families in all of England. His elegant house in Philpot
Lane, not far from the tall spires of the Church of St.
Margaret’s Pattens, had become
the headquarters of the Virginia
Company. It was here that the Company’s
broadsides instructed all interested “workmen of whatever craft they
may be, blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, shipwrights, turners and such as know how to plant vineyards, hunters,
fishermen, and all who work in any kind of metal,
men who make bricks, architects, bak- ers, weavers,
shoemakers, sawyers and those who spin wool and all others,
men as well as women,
who have any occupation, who wish to go out” to Virginia, to come and have their names entered
on the list and receive
in- structions about their work for the Company and their eventual
share in the division of land. Those who did not wish to go to Virginia
themselves could buy a share of the joint-stock issue for twelve
pounds sterling. Then,
as the Virginia Company fervently hoped, the new colony’s
future earnings would provide them all with
handsome profits.
“Come into the library,” Sir Thomas said.
When he and Smith were inside,
he closed the large double doors carefully
and turned the brass lock.
“Now,” he said,
“we can talk undisturbed—and not be overheard. I have read your
letter, but I want to hear what happened
in your own words.”
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