Without taking Captain John Smith at his own estimate of himself, he was a peculiar character even for the times in which he lived.  He shared with his contemporaries the restless spirit of roving and adventure which resulted from the invention of the mariner’s compass and the discovery of the New World; but he was neither so sordid nor so rapacious as many of them, for his boyhood reading of romances had evidently fired him with the conceits of the past chivalric period.  This imported into his conduct something inflated and something elevated.  And, besides, with all his enormous conceit, he had a stratum of practical good sense, a shrewd wit, and the salt of humor.

If Shakespeare had known him, as he might have done, he would have had a character ready to his hand that would have added one of the most amusing and interesting portraits to his gallery.  He faintly suggests a moral Falstaff, if we can imagine a Falstaff without vices.  As a narrator he has the swagger of a Captain Dalghetty, but his actions are marked by honesty and sincerity.  He appears to have had none of the small vices of the gallants of his time.  His chivalric attitude toward certain ladies who appear in his adventures, must have been sufficiently amusing to his associates.  There is about his virtue a certain antique flavor which must have seemed strange to the adventurers and court hangers-on in London.  Not improbably his assumptions were offensive to the ungodly, and his ingenuous boastings made him the object of amusement to the skeptics.  Their ridicule would naturally appear to him to arise from envy.  We read between the lines of his own eulogies of himself, that there was a widespread skepticism about his greatness and his achievements, which he attributed to jealousy.  Perhaps his obtrusive virtues made him enemies, and his rectitude was a standing offense to his associates.

It is certain he got on well with scarcely anybody with whom he was thrown in his enterprises.  He was of common origin, and always carried with him the need of assertion in an insecure position.  He appears to us always self-conscious and ill at ease with gentlemen born.  The captains of his own station resented his assumptions of superiority, and while he did not try to win them by an affectation of comradeship, he probably repelled those of better breeding by a swaggering manner.  No doubt his want of advancement was partly due to want of influence, which better birth would have given him; but the plain truth is that he had a talent for making himself disagreeable to his associates.  Unfortunately he never engaged in any enterprise with any one on earth who was so capable of conducting it as himself, and this fact he always made plain to his comrades.  Skill he had in managing savages, but with his equals among whites he lacked tact, and knew not the secret of having his own way without seeming to have it.  He was insubordinate, impatient of any authority over him, and unwilling to submit to discipline he did not himself impose.