num_pages: 432
description: He fought and beheaded three Turkish adversaries in duels. He was sold into slavery then murdered his master to escape. He sailed under a pirate flag was shipwrecked and marched to the gallows to be hanged only to be reprieved at the eleventh hour. And all this happened before he was thirty years old. This is Captain John Smiths life.Everyone knows the story of Pocahontas and how in 1607 she saved John Smith. And were it not for Smiths leadership the Jamestown colony would surely have failed. Yet Smith was a far more ambitious explorer and soldier of fortune than these tales suggest  and a far more ambitious self-promoter too. Now in this first new major biography of Smith in decades award-winning BBC filmmaker and author Peter Firstbrook traces the adventurers astonishing exploits across three continents testing Smiths own writings against the historical and geographical reality on the ground.With 'A Man Most Driven' Firstbrook delivers a riveting enlightening dissection of this myth-making man Englands arrival on the world stage and the creation of America.
language: English
title: A Man Most Driven: Captain John Smith, Pocahontas and the Founding of America
publisher: Oneworld Publications