John Smith, explorer, colonizer, historian, author, was born in Willoughby, Lincolnshire, England, where he was baptized on 9 January 1580, the son of George and Ann Smith, people of modest means. After brief schooling, he was apprenticed in 1595 to Thomas Sendall, a prominent merchant of nearby King's Lynn. Smith's father's death a year later brought him a modest patrimony, enough apparently to allow him to embark at seventeen on what would become a lifetime of adventuring. After almost four years of soldiering on the Continent, mostly in the Low Countries, which were then part of France, he returned to Lincolnshire by way of Scotland, apparently to recuperate from wounds. But country life seems not to have satisfied him: he spent much of his time in studying Niccolo Machiavelli's The Art of War (1521) and practicing horsemanship. By the end of the summer of 1600, he was off again, at the age of...