Notes and Documents
The Rehabilitation of CaptainJohn Smith
By LAURA POLANYISTRIKERBRADFORD
SMITHandSINCE Captain John Smith: His Life and Legend WAS PUBLISHED
nine years ago,' re-establishing on documentary evidence a reputation tarnished by several generations of faulty scholarship,
enough additional work has been done to prove Smith's veracity
beyond any likelihood of being again upset. Taken together, thefindings make an interesting story of rehabilitation.
The attack on Smith had begun about a hundred years ago
when John Gorham Palfrey urged on by Charles Deane doubted
the truth of Smith's exploits and said so in his History of New England. In the bitter aftermath of the Civil War Henry Adams, designing to attract attention to himself, let go a full broadsideagainst Smith, using Smith's own works as the means of proving
him a liar. His method-that of comparing parallel passages fromtwo of Smith's writings on Virginia-was impressive as a trick but
really added nothing to scholarship.2
Edward D. Neill next asserted that Smith's writings "are thoseof a gascon and beggar. He seemed to be always in the attitudeof one craving recognition or remuneration for alleged services."
Alexander Brown found him "certainly incapable of writing correct history where he was personally interested" and "in no way
properly equipped, for writing a disinterested and accurate history of the great movement." Then in 1890 came the Hungarian
Lewis Kropf with evidence allegedly from Hungarian sources toprove that everything Smith said about his travels and battles in
1 Bradford Smith, Captain John Smith: His Life and Legend (Philadelphia,1953), with an appendix by Laura Polanyi Striker, "Captain John Smith's Hungary and Transylvania."
2 John G. Palfrey, History of New England (5 vols., Boston, 1858-1890), I, 89;
Henry Adams, "Captain John Smith," North American Review, CIV (January1867), 1-30, reprinted in Charles F. Adams, Jr., and Henry Adams, Chapters ofErie, and Other Essays (Boston, 1871), 192-224.

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that country were fabrications.3American scholars, unable tochallenge Kropf when it came to Magyar sources, mostly concluded that the Captainwas a vain and boastfulliar.
A quiet reactionset in when reputablescholarslike CharlesM.
Andrews and Wesley Frank Craven used Smith as a reliable
sourcein theirown works,4concludingthat on the whole his statements were supportedby the new evidence providedby the publication of the VirginiaCompanyRecords.5Smith'sviews on Virginia, then, appearedto be vindicated. But how about Smith on
Smith?
To assesshis careerone biographyafter anotherhad been written, from the moralisticPeter Parley (1829) to that of the poet
John GouldFletcher a hundredyears later.6None added much towhat John Smithhad told of himself in his own books. Would atrip to England,to searchthe great collectionof documentsthere,
be worth while? In 1952 it hardly appearedso. For generations
Americanscholarshad been ransackingEnglish archivesfor significantmaterial.But there was only one way to find out whether
John Smith was a lying braggartor a reliablehistorian,and thatwas to test every statementhe made againstwhatevercontemporaryevidence could be found.
Despite many disappointments,the number of original documents which corroboratedSmith'sown accountsor added to themturned out to be surprising.The LincolnshireArchives,housedin
the great stone ExchequerGate in front of Lincoln cathedral,divulged the greatest prize of all-a parchment inventory of thehousehold goods of George Smith, John's father. From this wecould readily reconstructthe Smith home down to the meanest
dish. From it we also learned what Smith had never revealedthat his mother had remarriedvery soon after his father'sdeath,
3Edward D. Neill, History of the Virginia Company of London (Albany, 1869),
211n; Alexander Brown, The Genesis of the United States (Boston, 1890), 1010;
Lewis L. Kropf, "Captain John Smith of Virginia," Notes and Queries, s. 7, IX(January 4, 18, February 8, March 1, 22, April 12, 1890), 1-2, 41-43, 102-104,161-62, 223-24, 281-82.
4 See Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History (4 vols.,New Haven, 1934-1938), I; and Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company; the Failure of a Colonial Experience (New York, 1932) and The
Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689 (Baton Rouge, 1949).
5 Susan M. Kingsbury (ed.), The Records of the Virginia Company of London(4 vols., Washington, 1906-1935).
6 Samuel Griswold Goodrich (Peter Parley, pseud.), Stories About CaptainJohn Smith of Virginia... (Hartford, 1829); John Gould Fletcher, John SmithAlso Pocahontas (New York, 1928).

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OF SOUTHERNHISTORYa point which had somethingto do with John'swanderingsfrom
home at so earlyan age.
The court rolls and the WilloughbyParishregister transcript,
both in the Exchequer Gate, provided further traces of George
Smith which enabled us to see what mannerof man he was; anda study of the AncasterCollectionpapersthere led us back to theHistorical ManuscriptCommission'sReport on the Manuscriptsof the Earl of Ancaster (Dublin, 1907) which containsa precious
referenceto Smith'sgoing to Francewith young PeregrineBertie,
son of LordWilloughby,lord of the manorin that part of Lincolnshire. The Essex Record Office at Chelmsfordsupplied a surveyof Danbury Place where John Smith had stayed in 1630 whilewriting his Advertisementsfor the UnexperiencedPlanters ofNew-Englandin the home of SirHumphreyMildmay.
In London, the vast collection of wills in SomersetHouse produced not only John Smith'swill, which has long been known,buta protest of the will by the widow of John'sbrotherwhich had
never been discovered.In the Public RecordOfficeSmith'sletterof appeal to Sir FrancisBaconturnedup as expected,but also unexpectedly a whole list of New England places in Smith'sown
hand. The LondonGuildhallprovidedrecordsof the many seventeenth-centuryguilds to whom John Smith vainly appealed foraid in mountinga successfulexpeditionto his beloved New England which he had explored and named and, but for the hardluck that dogged him, might have been the first to settle. The
bound records of the Goldsmithscontained interesting information about the assay masterJohn Reynoldswhom Smith remembered in his will. It was easy to findtracesof the substantialfamilyof Saltonstalls,in whose home John slipped out of life at the ageof fifty-one. But nowhere could we get on the track of ThomasParker,except to confirmthat he was a clerkof the Privy Seal. To
him John left that coat of arms which Kropf called "an exceedingly clumsypiece of forgery."7Then there was the Latin life by Henry Whartonwhich had tobe rediscoveredin the LambethPalace Librarywhere it had slept
unnoticedunder the index entry of JohannisFabricius.At King'sLynnwe had the pleasureof discoveringa good deal of documentary evidence on Thomas Sendall, the man Smith says he wasapprenticedto in his teens. Sendallwas three times Lord Mayorof King'sLynn-truly, as John Smithsaid, "thegreatestmerchantof all those parts."8
7 Kropf, "CaptainJohn Smith of Virginia,"282.
8 Edward Arber (ed.), Travels and Works of Captain John Smith (2 vols.,

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By slow accretion, all of these documents and many more fragments began to build the picture of a man whose word was thetruth wherever it could be tested, but there still remained a large
gap-the Hungarian adventures, so fully and romantically told in
Smith's own True Travels. With their account of single combat,
near death on the battlefield, and a life of slavery in Turkey, thesepages had raised scholarly eyebrows for many a year. Only athoroughly competent Hungarian scholar, willing to go at themwith a clear mind, could dare confront them.
This task too was accomplished.9 When all the evidence was in,it became clear that Smith was not only telling the truth about hisadventures in Hungary, but that he could not possibly have described events there as he did from any reading or poring overmaps. The contest in Hungary was so complicated-Turk against
Christian, Catholic against Protestant, leaders changing sides,and areas rapidly changing hands-that John Smith would havebeen hopelessly entangled had he tried to fake an account of military adventures there. Not only does Hungarian history corroborate Smith wherever he can be checked, but his own account clarifies an area of Hungarian history that is full of obscurity in theHungarian sources. His writings make him an authority on Hungarian history!
When these things had been determined, the book went topress. But the evidence continued to come in.
From France came identification of the "Earle of Ployer" whom
Smith claims to have stayed with when, stripped by robbers, he
was left without a sou in a strange country. Ployer, says Smith,
had been brought up in England during the war in France (15901596), together with his brothers "Viscount Poomory and Barond'Mercy." The whole puzzle was unraveled with the discovery
that Amaury de Gouyon, comte de Plouer, was also viscomte deTonquedec (Smith speaks of his fair castle of Tuncadeck) et dePommerith, and baron de Marce. He did indeed have a brother
who was called Gouyon de Marce, and it is therefore quite possible, even likely, that there was another brother who used thename of Pommerith-Smith's Poomory. Plouer, a zealous Calvinist, might well have been sent to England by Protestant parents
who felt that their children were in real danger. And indeed family tradition affirms this. If Smith had been trying to tell a plausible lie, he would have used names he could copy correctly from
Edinburgh, 1910), II, 822. The writings of Smith referred to in this paper may befound in these volumes.
9 See the Strikerappendix in Smith, Captain John Smith, 311-42.

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a book. That he relied on his own memory and his own orthography is doubly convincing.'0
Meanwhile the Hungarian research continued. Dr. Franz Pichler, archivist of the Central Archive of Styria at Graz in Austria,
examined not only his own materials but also archives in Vienna,
Munich, Rome, Budapest, Eisenstadt, and Maribor (Yugoslavia).
He was able to supply military details of the time and place whichstrongly fortify Smith's account. Pichler identifies Smith's "EarlVon Sulch" more accurately as Karl Ludwig, Count of Sultz, who
was chief of artillery in the Imperial Army. As for the battle at aplace Smith calls "Olumpagh,"Pichler concluded that it was more
likely Unter Limbach (which Smith might have heard in the Hungarian form Al Limbach) than the Oberlimbach we had fixedupon. He also found strong evidence of such military activity inthat area as Smith describes.
To test the practicability of the message Smith claims to havesent by a prearranged torch code, Pichler engaged the co-operation of the Boy Scouts of Graz. Using Smith's method, they succeeded in sending a message seven kilometers from mountaintop
to mountaintop, deciphering perfectly the message Smith had sentin that neighborhood more than 350 years before."
Pichler's conclusions appeared in 1957, the three hundred andfiftieth anniversary of John Smith's landing in Virginia, a year thatbrought two other important studies.
Philip Barbour, a specialist in East European history, subjected
John Smith's account of his travels through Turkey and Russia toa close examination. He concluded that while Smith occasionallyrefreshed his memory by reference to some contemporary book,he himself usually supplied the first, or almost the first, authentic
information about these little-known regions.
In that part of Smith's True Travels which describes the routehe took from Constantinople into eastern Turkey, and thenthrough Russia after escaping from slavery, more than thirty place
names are mentioned, none of which appears on maps available toSmith. As usual, the spellings are Smith's own. By clever detective
work, Barbour identifies most of them. Smith's Panassa is Pinarhisar, Musa is Musat (now Kirilovo), Lastilla is Lascillo, Taur is theold name for Crimea, and his Straight of Niger derives from Mare
10 Bradford Smith, "Captain Smith's Earl of Ployer," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography,LXII (July 1954), 348-49.
11J. Franz Pichler, "Captain John Smith in the Light of Styrian Sources,"ibid.,
LXV (July 1957), 332-54.

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Nigrum, the old name for the Black Sea. Smith's Sea of Dissabacca
comes from Mar delle Sabacche, while Nalbrits where he was aslave was Nalbars or Naubaris. In Russia he visited Caragnaw,
identified as Chernava, Letch which is Yelets, and Donka which isDankov. His Berniske is Bryansk, his Newgrod in Seberia is Novgorod-Severski, his Rezechica is Rechitsa. Then came Coroski
which would be Korosten, Drohobus or Dorogobuzh, and twoplaces called Duberesko and Duzihell which Barbour ingeniously
identifies as Barashi and Zvyahel with the Russian preposition do(up to) prefixed-the way John Smith probably heard them. Perhaps Barbour's most interesting speculation is on the name of thelady to whom Smith was a slave-Charatza Tragabigzanda, as
Smith calls her. Barbour believes Smith heard her referred to as
Koratsa Trapedzoondia-"a girl from Trebizond"-and mistook
this for a name.12
Also published in 1957 was Henry Wharton's The Life of John
Smith, English Soldier, rediscovered at Lambeth and for the firsttime translated from Latin into English, two hundred and seventytwo years after it was written. Since Wharton wrote it only fiftyfour years after Smith's death, it is the earliest of all Smith biographies. He believed that Smith's achievements were equal tothose of the most celebrated heroes of antiquity. Since Wharton
was one of the greatest scholars of his day, we can not take lightly
his words, "I pledge my honor that this entire story is true," eventhough he claims more for his hero than would a cautious biographer today.13
Next, the Hungarian writer Lewis Kropf was thoroughly studied and his shortcomings made clear. A review of all the evidence
showed that Kropf had only a superficial knowledge of the history of those years when John Smith was in Hungary and that
Smith's account of those years helps clarify that history itself, especially the three separate campaigns waged in 1602. Careful research in original sources had finally demolished Kropf, cornerstone of the detractors of Smith, and furnished further evidenceof Smith's reliability.14
12 Philip L. Barbour, "Captain John Smith's Route Through Turkey and Russia,"
William and Mary Quarterly, s. 3, XIV (July 1957), 358-69. See also Philip L.
Barbour, "Captain John Smith's Observations on Life in Tartary," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, LXVIII (July 1960), 271-83.

13 Henry Wharton, The

Life of John Smith, English Soldier, Laura PolanyiStriker, trans. (Chapel Hill, 1957).
14 Laura Polanyi Striker, "The Hungarian Historian, Lewis L. Kropf, on Cap-tain John Smith's True Travels," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography,
LXVI (January 1958), 22-43.

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OF SOUTHERNHISTORYAs the archives in Hungary and Austria were further explored,
Smith's accuracy and reliability continued to gain ground. The
Esterhazy and Batthyany Archives; the Central Archive; WarHistorical Archive and National Museum in Budapest; and theWar, State, and Court Archives in Vienna all contributed valuable
nuggets. They confirm the position of Smith's Baron Khisl (Kissell), provide further evidence of the fighting Smith described,
call for a rallying of forces at Radkersburg in July 1601, stress thedanger from Turks in early 1601, and report on the battle ofSzekesfehervar, describing the work of Smith's Count Schulz, field
master of artillery, who brought his pieces from Komorn, whereSmith had demonstrated his "fieryDragons" to him, to Szkesfehervar where Smith routed the Turks with his pyrotechnical trick.'5
Meanwhile Philip Barbour, continuing his investigation ofSmith's eastern adventures, has come up with a new solution towhat Smith meant by the "Plaines of Regall" and is planning a
new biography which will incorporate his findings. He has identified Theodora Polaloga, the riding master at Tattershall, and has
discovered the origin of Smith's ulgries, stroggs, and cavatina. His
book will also include a hypothesis to explain Smith's association
with the Virginia venturers.
There are many things we would still like to discover. The "littlebooke" Smith says he wrote to Queen Anne, for instance, when
Pocahontas was in England, telling the Queen how valuable Pocahontas had been to the colony and suggesting how valuable itwould be if Pocahontas were royally welcomed. Or the lists ofpersons authorized to travel overseas-those for the years thatwould interest us are now lost. Or some of the books John Smith
left in his will. Or documentary evidence of John Smith's presencein Hungary.
At about the time of the Civil War, Smith, once scorned as afellow without gentle birth, now ironically became the symbol ofSouthern honor. Northern historians attacked him as a way of15 See John Smith, The True Travels, Adventures and Observations... (London,1630). Of the many archival items collected, the most pertinent are Batthyany
20699-20702; Archduke Ferdinand to Michael Deschauer, May 15, 1601 (WarArchives Register, Vienna); and report of Archduke Matthias on Szekesfehervarand Schulz, November 17, 1601 (War Archives, Vienna and Budapest). Laura
Polanyi Striker, coauthor of the present article, was in the midst of drawing together her latest researchesin European archives at the time of her death in December 1959. While the main lines of this work are known to us, and many of thedocuments are preserved, it is impossible for the surviving author to complete herwork, characterized by untiring and often inspired research and by her devotion
to John Smith.

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undermining the South's symbol of itself. Southern historians defended him. For nearly a century the Northerners appeared tohave won the contest, but in recent years careful research has atlast replaced brilliant conjecture and clever argument. And as thedocumentary evidence piles up, the scale tips more and more toJohn Smith's side.