Nearly every trace of this insatiable explorer of the earth has disappeared from it except in his own writings.  The only monument to his memory existing is a shabby little marble shaft erected on the southerly summit of Star Island, one of the Isles of Shoals.  By a kind of irony of fortune, which Smith would have grimly appreciated, the only stone to perpetuate his fame stands upon a little heap of rocks in the sea; upon which it is only an inference that he ever set foot, and we can almost hear him say again, looking round upon this roomy earth, so much of which he possessed in his mind, “No lot for me but Smith’s Isles, which are an array of barren rocks, the most overgrowne with shrubs and sharpe whins you can hardly passe them:  without either grasse or wood but three or foure short shrubby old cedars.”

Nearly all of Smith’s biographers and the historians of Virginia have, with great respect, woven his romances about his career into their narratives, imparting to their paraphrases of his story such an elevation as his own opinion of himself seemed to demand.  Of contemporary estimate of him there is little to quote except the panegyrics in verse he has preserved for us, and the inference from his own writings that he was the object of calumny and detraction.  Enemies he had in plenty, but there are no records left of their opinion of his character.  The nearest biographical notice of him in point of time is found in the “History of the Worthies of England,” by Thomas Fuller, D.D., London, 1662.

Old Fuller’s schoolmaster was Master Arthur Smith, a kinsman of John, who told him that John was born in Lincolnshire, and it is probable that Fuller received from his teacher some impression about the adventurer.

Of his “strange performances” in Hungary, Fuller says:  “The scene whereof is laid at such a distance that they are cheaper credited than confuted.”

“From the Turks in Europe he passed to the pagans in America, where towards the latter end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth [it was in the reign of James] such his perils, preservations, dangers, deliverances, they seem to most men above belief, to some beyond truth.  Yet have we two witnesses to attest them, the prose and the pictures, both in his own book; and it soundeth much to the diminution of his deeds that he alone is the herald to publish and proclaim them.”

“Surely such reports from strangers carry the greater reputation.  However, moderate men must allow Captain Smith to have been very instrumental in settling the plantation in Virginia, whereof he was governor, as also Admiral of New England.”

“He led his old age in London, where his having a prince’s mind imprisoned in a poor man’s purse, rendered him to the contempt of such as were not ingenuous.  Yet he efforted his spirits with the remembrance and relation of what formerly he had been, and what he had done.”

Of the “ranting epitaph,” quoted above, Fuller says:  “The orthography, poetry, history and divinity in this epitaph are much alike.”