The 400th anniversary of the arrival of Capt. John Smith to these shores passed in relative quiet. It might have been a big deal, since it was Smith who gave this region its name and rid us of our previous designation as “Northern Virginia.”
Smith toured this region in 1614 and named the Isles of Shoals “Smith Isles” after himself, we assume. That name didn’t stick. Smith then made a number of failed attempts to launch a colony, possibly headed to the Piscataqua Region.
His constant promotion of this region was commercial, not religious. His famous map of New England helped launch a new wave of colonization beginning in 1620. The Mayflower Separatists even considered hiring Smith as their guide and military enforcer. Miles Standish got the job.
Smith died in 1631, just as Strawberry Bank was fully established as NH’s first permanent settlement at what is now Portsmouth. If you believe Smith’s own account of Jamestown, Virginia, we owe much of our own history to Pocahontas. The Indigenous teen, legend says, prevented her father from crushing Smith’s head with a rock in 1607.
Historians hotly debate the authenticity of the Pocahontas story, along with much of Smith’s writing. But the fact remains that John Smith was a key promoter of English colonization in America, for good and for ill. Had his colony succeeded, we might be living in Smithsonia.
SEE the 400th anniversary Smith Memorial in Rye, NH
Copyright J. Dennis Robinson
Lounging at the Farragut Hotel