While he was sleeping in his boat his powder-bag was accidentally fired; the explosion tore the flesh from his body and thighs, nine or ten inches square, in the most frightful manner.  To quench the tormenting fire, frying him in his clothes, he leaped into the deep river, where, ere they could recover him, he was nearly drowned.  In this pitiable condition, without either surgeon or surgery, he was to go nearly a hundred miles.

It is now time for the appearance upon the scene of the boy Henry Spelman, with his brief narration, which touches this period of Smith’s life.  Henry Spelman was the third son of the distinguished antiquarian, Sir Henry Spelman, of Coughan, Norfolk, who was married in 1581.  It is reasonably conjectured that he could not have been over twenty-one when in May, 1609, he joined the company going to Virginia.  Henry was evidently a scapegrace, whose friends were willing to be rid of him.  Such being his character, it is more than probable that he was shipped bound as an apprentice, and of course with the conditions of apprenticeship in like expeditions of that period—­to be sold or bound out at the end of the voyage to pay for his passage.  He remained for several years in Virginia, living most of the time among the Indians, and a sort of indifferent go between of the savages and the settlers.  According to his own story it was on October 20, 1609, that he was taken up the river to Powhatan by Captain Smith, and it was in April, 1613, that he was rescued from his easy-setting captivity on the Potomac by Captain Argall.  During his sojourn in Virginia, or more probably shortly after his return to England, he wrote a brief and bungling narration of his experiences in the colony, and a description of Indian life.  The Ms. was not printed in his time, but mislaid or forgotten.  By a strange series of chances it turned up in our day, and was identified and prepared for the press in 1861.  Before the proof was read, the type was accidentally broken up and the Ms. again mislaid.  Lost sight of for several years, it was recovered and a small number of copies of it were printed at London in 1872, edited by Mr. James F. Hunnewell.

Spelman’s narration would be very important if we could trust it.  He appeared to have set down what he saw, and his story has a certain simplicity that gains for it some credit.  But he was a reckless boy, unaccustomed to weigh evidence, and quite likely to write as facts the rumors that he heard.  He took very readily to the ways of Indian life.  Some years after, Spelman returned to Virginia with the title of Captain, and in 1617 we find this reference to him in the “General Historie”:  “Here, as at many other times, we are beholden to Capt.  Henry Spilman, an interpreter, a gentleman that lived long time in this country, and sometimes a prisoner among the Salvages, and done much good service though but badly rewarded.”  Smith would probably not have left this on record had he been aware of the contents of the Ms. that Spelman had left for after-times.