He was finally taken captive to the Powhatan, the ruler of the tribe, and, according to Smith’s story, a long debate ensued among the Indians as to his fate.  Presently two large stones were laid before the chief, and Smith was dragged to them and his head forced down upon them, but even as one of the warriors raised his club to dash out the captive’s brains, the Powhatan’s daughter, a child of thirteen named Pocahontas, threw herself upon him, shielding his head with hers, and claimed him for her own, after the Indian custom.  Smith was thereupon released, adopted into the tribe, and sent back to Jamestown, where he arrived on the eighth of January, 1608.

From the Indian standpoint, there was nothing especially unusual about this procedure, for any member of the tribe was privileged to claim a captive, if he wished.  A century before, Ortiz, a member of De Soto’s expedition, had been captured by the Indians and saved in precisely the same way, and many instances of the kind occurred in the years which followed.  But to the captive, it partook of the very essence of romance; he had only the dimmest idea of what was really happening, and his account of it, written many years later, was of the most sentimental kind.  Many doubts have been cast on the story, and historians seem hopelessly divided about it, as they are about many other incidents of Smith’s life.  Certain it is, however, that Pocahontas afterwards befriended the colony on more than one occasion; and was finally converted, married to a planter named John Rolfe, and taken to England, where, among the artificialities of court life, she soon sickened and died.

On the very day that Smith reached Jamestown with his Indian escort, the supply ship sent out by Captain Newport also arrived, bringing 120 new colonists.  Of the original 105, only thirty-eight were left alive.  But Smith’s enemies were yet in the ascendancy, and he spent the summer of 1608 in exploration, leaving the colony to its own devices.  When he returned to it in September, he found it reduced and disheartened.  His brave and cheery presence acted as a tonic, and at last the colonists, appreciating him at his true value, elected him president.  He put new life into everyone, and when, soon afterwards, Newport arrived again from England with fresh supplies, he found the colony in fairly good shape.

But the members of the Virginia Company were growing impatient at the failure of the venture to bring any returns, and they sent out instructions by Newport demanding that either a lump of gold be sent back to England or that the way to the South Sea be discovered.  Smith said plainly that the instructions were ridiculous, and wrote an answer to them in blunt soldier English.  Then, turning his hand in earnest to the government of the disorderly rabble under him, he instituted an iron discipline, whipped the laggards into line, and by the end of April had some twenty houses built, thirty or forty acres of ground broken up and planted,