Captain John Smith at Jamestown

It is twenty past three on a winter afternoon in late December 1607 (the exact date is unrecorded; Smith's account places it in the thirty-fifth day of his captivity, which would put it at about the twenty-ninth or thirtieth of December by the Old Style calendar), in the centre of the longhouse of Powhatan at the town of Werowocomoco on the north bank of the Pamunkey River in tidewater Virginia, in the pale winter light of the pre-Christmas Algonquian midwinter. He is twenty-seven years old. He is John Smith, born at Willoughby in Lincolnshire in January 1580, son of George Smith the Lincolnshire yeoman farmer and Alice Rickard, schooled at the Louth grammar school, soldier in the Dutch Revolt, soldier in the Habsburg-Ottoman wars in Hungary 1601–02 (where he was decorated for the single-combat killings of three Ottoman cavalry officers, was wounded and enslaved at the Battle of Rotenturm, and escaped from his Crimean captivity through the Black Sea to North Africa), one of the seven councillors of the Virginia Company colony at Jamestown that had been established at the Jamestown peninsula in May 1607, the surviving councillor since the September deaths of two and the November deaths of two others.

He has, in the past five weeks, been a captive of the Powhatan Confederacy. He had been the leader of a foraging expedition up the Chickahominy River in the early December and had been ambushed by the Powhatan war-leader Opechancanough (the brother of Powhatan) at a inland bend of the river. Two of his English companions had been killed in the ambush; he had been taken alive on the express order of Opechancanough, kept under guard at three successive Powhatan towns through the five weeks, and brought to Werowocomoco about a week ago for the audience with Powhatan.

He is bound at the wrists with bark rope. He has been laid on two flat stones in the centre of the longhouse, the stones placed end-to-end so that his head rests on the first and his shoulders on the second. Powhatan, the paramount chief, sits on a raised platform of woven mats at the east end of the longhouse, in a cloak of raccoon-skins, in his late sixties. About forty Powhatan warriors stand around the walls of the longhouse with war-clubs.

He thinks: the form is the form. The stones are the place of execution. The procedure of the Powhatan, by the account I have heard from the other captives in the past five weeks, is the club-stroke to the skull at the chief's nod.

He thinks: the position is, in plain reading, that I am to be killed in the next several minutes.

He thinks: the English-colony at Jamestown is forty-five miles south. The colony at this hour, by my departure-count of the fifty-four colonists who had been alive when I left Jamestown on the tenth of December, is at thirty-eight survivors. The colony cannot survive the winter without the foraging-trade negotiations I was in this country to conduct. If I am killed in this longhouse the colony is lost within six weeks.

Powhatan raises his hand. By the form, this is the signal for the club-stroke.

And here, by the 1624 Generall Historie account, the girl Matoaka (in her ten-year-old form, Pocahontas the playful-one in the Powhatan language, the daughter of Powhatan and his wife) runs forward from the women's-side of the longhouse, takes Smith's head in her arms, and lays her own head upon his. The clubs are stayed. Powhatan, by Smith's account, calls the girl off, raises Smith to a sitting position on the stones, and announces to the assembled longhouse that Smith is, from this hour, the adopted son of Powhatan and the brother of Pocahontas. Powhatan offers Smith the forty-villages of Capahowsick as a territory, on the condition that Smith bring up two cannon and a grindstone from Jamestown as a tribute.

Smith was released back to the Jamestown colony in early January 1608. He never recorded the Pocahontas-intervention in his True Relation of 1608 (written within the year of the events; published in London 1608); he first recorded it in his Generall Historie of Virginia of 1624, sixteen years after the events and at the posthumous-publication moment of Pocahontas's widow Rebecca (the baptismal name she had taken at her 1614 conversion-and-marriage to John Rolfe of the Virginia colony; Pocahontas had died in 1617 at Gravesend on the return voyage from her 1616 visit to England). The modern ethnohistorical reading, by Helen Rountree and Camilla Townsend, is that the 1607 ceremony was a Powhatan adoption-ritual (in which the initiate's symbolic death is followed by the reincorporation into a new father-son relationship under Powhatan, with the rescuer being a female-relative of the adoptive father; Pocahontas, as Powhatan's daughter, was in the canonical role for the rescuer in the ritual). Smith, by Rountree, had taken the ceremony as a execution because he did not understand the ritual; the 1624 account preserves the experience as he had lived it, not the ritual as the Powhatans had performed it.

John Smith returned to England in October 1609 after a gunpowder-accident injury at Jamestown that had rendered him partially-incapacitated. He published the True Relation in 1608, the Map of Virginia in 1612, the Description of New England in 1616 (which gave the region the name New England and the 1614 Plymouth-Massachusetts coastline its English names), and the Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles in 1624. He died at his lodging in London on the twenty-first of June 1631, fifty-one years old. He is buried in the church of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, at the west end of Newgate Street in central London (the same parish church in which the Tower of London executions had the bells of St Sepulchre rung for the condemned on the eve of execution). The brass plaque in the south aisle records his epitaph in his own composition: here lies one conquered, that hath conquered Kings, / subdued large territories, and done things / which to the world impossible would seem / but that the truth is held in more esteem.