experience to his country:  “Should I present it to the Biskayners, French and Hollanders, they have made me large offers.  But nature doth bind me thus to beg at home, whom strangers have pleased to create a commander abroad....  Though I can promise no mines of gold, the Hollanders are an example of my project, whose endeavors by fishing cannot be suppressed by all the King of Spain’s golden powers.  Worth is more than wealth, and industrious subjects are more to a kingdom than gold.  And this is so certain a course to get both as I think was never propounded to any state for so small a charge, seeing I can prove it, both by example, reason and experience.”

Smith’s maxims were excellent, his notions of settling New England were sound and sensible, and if writing could have put him in command of New England, there would have been no room for the Puritans.  He addressed letter after letter to the companies of Virginia and Plymouth, giving them distinctly to understand that they were losing time by not availing themselves of his services and his project.  After the Virginia massacre, he offered to undertake to drive the savages out of their country with a hundred soldiers and thirty sailors.  He heard that most of the company liked exceedingly well the notion, but no reply came to his overture.

He laments the imbecility in the conduct of the new plantations.  At first, he says, it was feared the Spaniards would invade the plantations or the English Papists dissolve them:  but neither the councils of Spain nor the Papists could have desired a better course to ruin the plantations than have been pursued; “It seems God is angry to see Virginia in hands so strange where nothing but murder and indiscretion contends for the victory.”

In his letters to the company and to the King’s commissions for the reformation of Virginia, Smith invariably reproduces his own exploits, until we can imagine every person in London, who could read, was sick of the story.  He reminds them of his unrequited services:  “in neither of those two countries have I one foot of land, nor the very house I builded, nor the ground I digged with my own hands, nor ever any content or satisfaction at all, and though I see ordinarily those two countries shared before me by them that neither have them nor knows them, but by my descriptions....  For the books and maps I have made, I will thank him that will show me so much for so little recompense, and bear with their errors till I have done better.  For the materials in them I cannot deny, but am ready to affirm them both there and here, upon such ground as I have propounded, which is to have but fifteen hundred men to subdue again the Salvages, fortify the country, discover that yet unknown, and both defend and feed their colony.”