166 WORKMEN AND HEROES CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH* BY MARION HARLAND (1579-1631) O' the antecedents of John Smith, Esquire, Captain and Knight, little is recorded beyond the facts that he was of gentle blood and hon- orable lineage, and that he was born in Lancashire, England, in 1579. He was still under age when he en- listed as a private soldier and fought with "our army" in Flanders. Sigis- mund Bathor, Duke of Transylvania, was warring with the Turks, and young Smith, athirst for adventure, next took service under him. Before the Transylvanian town of Regall, he killed three Turkish officers in single combat, for which doughty deed he was knighted. The certificate of Sigismund's patent empowering the Englishman to quarter three Turks' heads upon the family coat-of-arms is in the Herald's Office in London. The tables were turned by his subsequent capture by the Turks. He was sent to Tartary as a slave, not a prisoner of war, and compelled to perform the most ignoble tasks, until, escaping by killing his brutal master, he made his way by his wits to his native country in 1604. He was now twenty-five years of age, and emphatically a soldier of fortune. The tale of his prowess and adventures had preceded him, and he was eagerly welcomed in London by kindred spirits who were preparing to emigrate to America to form the colony of Virginia under the grant and direct patronage of James I. By the time the enterprise was ripe for execution, Smith had made himself so useful in counsel and prepara- tion that the king named him as one of the councillors of the prospective colony. The boundary lines of the royal grant were two hundred miles north, and the same distance south, of the mouth of the James River, and east and west "from sea to sea." On December 19, 1606, the band of adventurers, 100 in number, embarked at Gravesend in three small vessels. Christopher Newport was in command, but Smith, and his close allies, Bartholomew Gosnold and George Percy, a younger brother of the Duke of Northumberland, were the ruling spirits of the voyagers. Carpenters and laborers were oddly jumbled upon the list of emigrants with Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.
