Authors: Michael Blanding
Smith never explained what made him sign up with the Virginia Company’s expedition to America in December 1606. It doesn’t take much, however, to imagine how irresistibly the lure of that adventure must have tugged at him. If even half his later accounts can be believed, he had seen firsthand how knowledge, bravery, and hard work paid off in his promotion from a common soldier to an officer. Here, now, was a chance to distinguish himself in the New World, where the old social strata wouldn’t apply. Some historians have, in fact, seen Smith as one of the very first adherents of the American Dream, championing a new meritocracy to replace the aristocracy of Europe.
The idea didn’t go over so well. Clashing from the beginning with the higher-ranking “gentlemen” aboard ship, Smith was clapped in irons barely a month out of England and accused of instigating a mutiny. By the time the expedition arrived in the Caribbean, one of his chief accusers had erected a gallows, and Smith only narrowly avoided being hung. After that inauspicious start, the expedition’s leaders must have gotten a shock when they touched land at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay and opened the sealed orders to reveal the names of the seven men chosen by the Virginia Company to govern the colony. There, among the names of the rich and highborn gentlemen, was one exception: John Smith.
Smith gained his release and cleared his name to take his place among the governors of the colony—but wasted no time in stirring up a coup against the colony’s president, whom he accused of hogging the colony’s meager stores. By all accounts, the first year in Jamestown was a disaster. The gentlemen farmers who ran the colony placed their hopes on a resupply from England, rather than planting and harvesting their own fields. When that relief didn’t come, starvation and disease set in. Within twelve months, half the original 105 colonists were dead. At the same time, the settlers had to deal with Native American tribes, who carried out repeated raids on the colonists occupying their land.
That the colonists survived at all was probably thanks to Smith, who was put in charge of relations with the tribes. No matter how much Smith caused trouble or puffed himself up, there was no denying his singular gifts as a colonist. Through a combined strategy of trading with friendly tribes
and preemptively attacking hostile villages, he kept the colonists protected and ensured enough food to make it through the first years of settlement.
It was at this time the Pocahontas legend was born. Just before New Year’s in 1608, Smith was captured by the Native American chief Powhatan, regional overlord of the area’s many tribes, who laid him out on a pair of rocks for execution. At that moment, the chief’s daughter Pocahontas interceded, begging her father to spare his life. Later biographers have surmised that the whole affair may have been a ritual involving a mock execution that Smith mistook for the real thing. But whatever the truth, Powhatan became a sometime friend to the English and Smith walked free of captivity once again. Over the next two years, Pocahontas served as an invaluable aide to Smith in negotiating with the natives and supposedly saved his life a second time by warning him of an ambush set by her temperamental father.
The colonists eventually elected Smith president, and he simultaneously made Virginia both a meritocracy and a dictatorship with his famous edict: “He that will not work shall not eat.” His leadership, however, was all too brief. Never one to disguise his contempt for his social betters, he made a long list of enemies, who were by now actively lobbying in England for his removal. The Virginia Company had already sent a new governor to replace him when Smith suffered a tragic accident. On an expedition upriver, his powder bag accidentally caught fire, badly burning him. He left the New World injured and disgraced, just two and a half years after he had arrived.
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BACK IN LONDON,
Smith nursed his wounds and his resentments against the Virginia Company. The following winter, he saw his convictions sadly vindicated when the new leaders’ ineptness led to a famine known as the Starving Time. The population, which now numbered five hundred, plummeted to sixty as colonists resorted to boiling boot leather, and in some cases each other, to survive.
For the next few years, Smith busied himself writing books about Virginia, criticizing his enemies and building up his own role in the enterprise. In one of them, published in 1612, he included a map of Virginia produced from his surveys and conversations with natives. Not only was it the most accurate map of the region to date, but also it
remained in use for more than three hundred years. In time, he learned to play the political game well enough to secure another expedition, funded by a group of investors out of Plymouth. They gave him orders to explore the coast of “North Virginia” for whale oil, fish, and furs. But Smith saw another opportunity: to correct the Virginia colony’s mistakes and claim a new settlement for England—and for himself.
He set sail with two ships in 1614, reaching the coast of what is now Maine and sailing a small boat in and out of harbors, making careful notes of fishing banks, anchorages, and native settlements. As he did, he grasped for a new name to solidify England’s claim on the area—and separate it from Virginia. With a bold stroke, Smith coined a new title for the entire region from Maine to Cape Cod: New England.
The name stuck. The Plymouth Company officially confirmed it upon Smith’s return and gratefully appointed him “admiral” of the new territory. They even outfitted him with a small fleet for his return journey, consisting of two ships and sixteen colonists. Unfortunately, they never made it. French pirates captured his ship off the Azores and took Smith captive again for several months. True to form, he escaped by taking advantage of a storm to commandeer one of the ship’s boats, taking with him a manuscript he’d started about his latest expeditions. Published in 1616 as
A Description of New England,
the book was part adventure yarn, with him as the swashbuckling main character, and part advertisement for the virtues of the region, which he breathlessly extolled as an unspoiled paradise of codfish and pine.
“
Could I have but the means to transport a colony, I would rather live here than anywhere,” he gushed, baldly spelling out his heretical notion of a country based on merit. “Here every man may be master and owner of his own labour and land,” he wrote. “
If he have nothing but his hands, he may set up this trade; he may by industry quickly grow rich.” To further promote the area, he worked with a Dutch engraver named Simon van de Passe to produce a detailed map of the coastline (
Figure 1
). Though an American Indian guide had helped him affix native names to the villages they had seen, he decided a bit of sycophancy couldn’t hurt his cause. So he sent out a copy of the map to the
fifteen-year-old crown prince, Charles, to humbly request he add his own names.
The prince obliged, naming the Charles River after himself, Cape Anna after his mother, and Cape James (
previously known as Cape Cod) after his
father. Further asserting English dominance, he renamed various native settlements after English cities— changing Sagoquas to Oxford, Aggawom to Southampton, Anmoughcawgen to Cambridge, and so on—and added London to a blank spot along the coast. The resulting map is an
unprecedented act of virtual colonization, claiming a huge swath of territory with a fictitious geography that served both Smith’s and England’s purposes.
In the end, however, Smith never saw his dream realized. After bad winds scuttled another expedition in 1617, Smith was never again able to navigate the political waters to fund a new voyage. He spent the remainder of his life in England, dining out on his adventures and writing books to establish his legacy.
His map of New England, however, did soon make it back to the New World. When the self-styled Pilgrims set out from Plymouth in 1620, they used it to steer the
Mayflower
around Cape Cod toward a site Smith had described as “an excellent good harbor, good land; and no want of any thing but industrious people.” Whether through coincidence or design, the harbor they chose had the same name on Smith’s map as the city in England from which they’d set out. They took it up for their new colony: Plimouth.
More settlers followed in later years to found Massachusetts Bay Colony. Despite his contributions, however, Smith found his reputation slipping away in future years as both colonies prospered without him. The last book he wrote before his death in 1631,
Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New-England, or Any Where,
was an anxious work, full of unsolicited advice drawn from Smith’s experiences of more than a dozen years before. In it, he built up the Massachusetts colonists at the expense of the Virginians, even as he lost no opportunity to tout his own accomplishments in establishing Virginia for what it was. And, so his contributions to New England wouldn’t be forgotten, he also included an updated version of the map he’d created of that territory fifteen years before.
—
SITTING IN THE READING ROOM
of the Beinecke Library nearly four centuries later, Smiley carefully turned the water-stained frontispiece of the book to reveal a map folded into a rectangle about six by eight inches wide. He spread it out on the table, examining the copper-engraved image he practically knew by heart. Unusual for maps of this time period—or any time period—a portrait of the mapmaker fills the entire upper left-hand corner
of the page. It is the only known portrait of Smith, drawn by van de Passe when the captain was thirty-six. He looks proud and wary, with shoulders thrown back and piercing eyes staring over a bushy beard and waxed mustache. In the portrait Smith eschews the ruffled collar of a gentleman in favor of a patterned leather jerkin, his hand resting lightly on the pommel of his sword—solidifying his reputation as a soldier and adventurer.
Carved around the portrait are the pits and points of the New England coastline. Despite a few notable errors, the map is regarded as the first accurate depiction of the Massachusetts and Maine coastlines, and the foundation for generations of maps that would come after it—all the more remarkable considering the short period of time Smith spent surveying. On this new map, Smith updates some names, writing the word “New” above Plimouth, and adding the recent settlement of Salem. But he left the other names given by Charles, now King Charles I, in place, perhaps hoping settlers might one day adopt them. (In the end, the only ones that have survived are Plymouth, Cape Ann, and the Charles River.)
For generations of collectors, the map is also notoriously difficult to pin down. Smith produced no less than nine different versions, or states, of the map, with subtle updates and corrections between 1616 and 1631. Copies of the same book have different maps depending on who printed it and when. And copies of the map continued to be reproduced long after Smith’s death. In some cases, booksellers peddling a copy of one of Smith’s books inserted a state from another book or a facsimile copy, which an inexperienced eye might mistake for an original. To a serious collector, all these slight differences matter a great deal. The state of the map and its rarity could mean a difference of tens of thousands of dollars in a sale.
Smiley knew this well. In fact, he was one of the few people in the world who knew just how rare this map was. Smith’s map of New England had become scarce on the market, with copies now coming up at auction once or twice in a generation and fetching anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000. With that thought in mind, Smiley refolded the map down into its original rectangle, about the size of a letter envelope. The map was already free in the book, its four-hundred-year-old glue long since having given way and separated from the binding. Smiley waited until he thought no one was looking and then quickly slipped the folded page into the pocket of his blazer.
At the circulation desk a dozen yards away, the Beinecke’s head of
security, Ralph Mannarino, was still watching Smiley for signs of suspicious behavior. Now as he watched Smiley get up to check something on the computer, he noticed that he seemed to be fidgeting with something inside his blazer pocket. That Smiley was even wearing a jacket on such a warm day seemed strange to him. As Smiley went to sit back down, Mannarino decided to call Yale Police for backup.
The call went to Detective Martin Buonfiglio, a tall officer with a gray mustache, who was dressed in a plainclothes uniform of a sports coat, tie, and khaki pants. He was just sitting down to lunch at a nearby pizza house. “Someone found a razor blade at the Beinecke,” his sergeant told him.
Buonfiglio shrugged. “So?” he said. “Call someone on patrol.”
“They are really upset down there,” the caller insisted. “I need you to check it out.”
With a glance at his uneaten pizza, Buonfiglio left the restaurant and walked the several blocks to the library, arriving by two o’clock. Once there, he went into the back office with Cordes, who explained the situation. “So what did he steal?” the detective asked.
“We don’t know,” answered Cordes. So far, she said, they hadn’t seen him steal anything— they’d just seen the razor blade and the suspicious behavior.
Buonfiglio sighed. If he was going to arrest Smiley, he’d need more evidence than that, he said. “Do you have a camera?”
Cordes told him that the library did have security cameras but, due to patron complaints, didn’t turn them on without permission from the president’s office.
“Turn it on,” Buonfiglio insisted, as he put in a call to his superior officer, Lieutenant Bill Holohan, for further instructions. The call went to voice mail, and so Buonfiglio waited along with the librarians. Around three o’clock he watched Smiley get up from his table and head back upstairs to the Beinecke’s storage lockers, looking like he was ready to leave. Buonfiglio considered calling a patrol officer to intercept him, but he worried an officer might be too aggressive. Finally, he decided to follow himself, trailing a few paces behind as Smiley walked out the front door.
—
CICADAS WERE WHIRRING
in the trees as Smiley left the library. He figured he had just enough time to visit the research library in the Yale
Center for British Art, which had one more atlas he wanted to examine before the fair in London. The day was now pushing eighty-five degrees, and Smiley started sweating almost immediately under his blazer. The long hours hunched over in the reading room had also taken their toll on his back, which throbbed with pain as he walked.