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Table of Contents

True Relation (1608).

Map of Virginia (1612).

Description of New England (1616).

New England’s Trials (1620).

Accidence for Young Seamen (1626).

Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624).

True Travels (1630).

Advertisements for Inexperienced Planters of New England (1631).

Captain John Smith.

Captain Smith’s style is honest and hearty in tone, picturesque, often amusing, never tiresome. It is involved and ungrammatical at times, but not obscure. The critics have professed to find many inaccuracies of historical statement; but the following, from Professor Edward Arber, the editor of the English Reprint of Smith’s Works, will acquit him of this charge:

“Inasmuch as the accuracy of some of Captain Smith’s statements has, in this generation, been called in question, it was but our duty to subject every one of the nearly forty thousand lines of this book to a most searching criticism; scanning every assertion of fact most keenly, and making the Text, by the insertion of a multitude of cross-references, prove or disprove itself.

“The result is perfectly satisfactory. Allowing for a popular style of expression, the Text is homogeneous; and the nine books comprising it, though written under very diverse circumstances, and at intervals over the period of twenty-two years (1608–1630), contain no material contradictions. Inasmuch, therefore, as wherever we can check Smith, we find him both modest and accurate, we are led to think him so, where no such check is possible, as at Nalbrits in the autumn of 1603, and on the Chickahominy in the winter of 1607-’8.” See Life, by Simms, by Warner, and by Eggleston in “Pocahontas.”