From the Indian standpoint, there was nothing especially unusual about this procedure, for any member of the tribe was privileged to claim a captive, if he wished. A century before, Ortiz, a member of De Soto's expedition, had been captured by the Indians and saved in precisely the same way, and many instances of the kind occurred in the years which followed. But to the captive, it partook of the very essence of romance; he had only the dimmest idea of what was really happening, and his account of it, written many years later, was of the most sentimental kind. Many doubts have been cast on the story, and historians seem hopelessly divided about it, as they are about many other incidents of Smith's life. Certain it is, however, that Pocahontas afterwards befriended the colony on more than one occasion; and was finally converted, married to a planter named John Rolfe, and taken to England, where, among the artificialities of court life, she soon sickened and died.
On the very day that Smith reached Jamestown with his Indian escort, the supply ship sent out by Captain Newport also arrived, bringing 120 new colonists. Of the original 105, only thirty-eight were left alive. But Smith's enemies were yet in the ascendancy, and he spent the summer of 1608 in exploration, leaving the colony to its own devices. When he returned to it in September, he found it reduced and disheartened. His brave and cheery presence acted as a tonic, and at last the colonists, appreciating him at his true value, elected him president. He put new life into everyone, and when, soon afterwards, Newport arrived again from England with fresh supplies, he found the colony in fairly good shape.
But the members of the Virginia Company were growing impatient at the failure of the venture to bring any returns, and they sent out instructions by Newport demanding that either a lump of gold be sent back to England or that the way to the South Sea be discovered. Smith said plainly that the instructions were ridiculous, and wrote an answer to them in blunt soldier English. Then, turning his hand in earnest to the government of the disorderly rabble under him, he instituted an iron discipline, whipped the laggards into line, and by the end of April had some twenty houses built, thirty or forty acres of ground broken up and planted, nets and weirs arranged for fishing, a new fortress under way, and various small manufactures begun. A great handicap was the system, by which all property was held in common, so that the drones shared equally with the workers, but Smith took care that there should be few drones. There can be no doubt that his sheer will power kept the colony together, but his credit with the company was undermined by enemies in England, nor did his own blunt letter help matters. The company was re-organized on a larger scale, a new governor appointed, new colonists started on the way; and, finally, in 1609, Smith was so seriously wounded by the explosion of a bag of gun-powder, that he gave up the struggle and returned to England.
Instant disaster followed. When he left the colony, it numbered five hundred souls; when the next supply ship reached it in May, 1610, it consisted of sixty scarecrows, mere wrecks of human beings. The rest had starved to death—or been eaten by their companions! There was a hasty consultation, and it was decided that Virginia must be abandoned. On Thursday, June 7, 1610, the cabins were stripped of such things as were of value, and the whole company went on shipboard and started down the river—only to meet, next day, in Hampton Roads, a new expedition headed by the new governor, Lord Delaware, himself! By this slight thread of coincidence was the fate of Virginia determined.
The ship put about at once, and on the following Sunday morning, Lord Delaware stepped ashore at Jamestown, and, falling to his knees, thanked God that he had been in time to save Virginia. He proceeded at once to place the colony upon a new and sounder basis, and it was never again in danger of extinction, though Jamestown itself was finally abandoned as unsuited to a settlement on account of its malarious atmosphere. But Virginia itself grew apace into one of the greatest of England's colonies in America.
John Smith himself never returned to Virginia. In 1614, he explored the coast south of the Penobscot, giving it the name it still bears, New England. A year later, while on another expedition, he was captured by the French and forced to serve against the Spaniards. Broken in health and fortune, he spent his remaining years in London, dying there in 1631. There is a portrait of him, showing him as a handsome, bearded man, with nose and mouth bespeaking will and spirit—just such a man as one would imagine this gallant soldier of fortune to have been.
While the English, under the guiding hand of John Smith, were fighting desperately to maintain themselves upon the James, the French were struggling to the same purpose and no less desperately along the St. Lawrence. We have seen how Jacques Cartier explored and named that region, but civil and religious wars in France put an end to plans of colonization for half a century, and it was not until 1603 that Samuel Champlain, the founder of New France, and one of the noblest characters in American history, embarked for the New World.
Samuel Champlain was born at Brouage about 1567, the son of a sea-faring father, and his early years were spent upon the sea. He served in the army of the Fourth Henry, and after the peace with Spain, made a voyage to Mexico. Upon his return to France in 1603, he found a fleet preparing to sail to Canada, and at once joined it. Some explorations were made of the St. Lawrence, but the fleet returned to France within the year, without accomplishing anything in the way of colonization. Another expedition in the following year saw the founding of Port Royal, while Champlain made a careful exploration of the New England coast, but he found nothing that attracted him as did the mighty river to the north. Thither, in 1608, he went, and sailing up the river to a point where a mighty promontory rears its head, disembarked and erected the first rude huts of the city which he called by the Indian name of Quebec, or "The Narrows." A wooden wall was built, mounting a few small cannon and loopholed for musketry, and the conquest of Canada had begun. A magnificent cargo of furs was dispatched to France, and Champlain and twenty-eight men were left to winter at Quebec. When spring came, only nine were left alive, but reinforcements and supplies soon arrived, and Champlain arranged to proceed into the interior and explore the country.
The resources at his disposal were small, he could not hope to assemble a great expedition; so he determined to make the venture with only a few men and little baggage, relying upon the friendship of the Indians, instead of seeking to conquer them, as the Spaniards had always done. Champlain had from the first treated the Indians well, and it was this necessity of gaining their friendship that determined the policy which France pursued—the policy of making friends of the Indians, entering into an alliance with them, and helping them fight their battles. Champlain opened operations by joining an Algonquin war-party against the Iroquois, and assisting at their defeat—starting, at the same time, a blood feud with that powerful tribe which endured as long as the French held Canada. In the course of this expedition, he discovered the beautiful lake which bears his name.
He went back to France for a time, after that, and on his next return to Canada, in 1611, began building a town at the foot of a rock which had been named Mont Royal, since corrupted to Montreal. Succeeding years were spent in further explorations, which carried him across Lake Ontario, and in plans for the conversion of the Indians, to which the aid of the Jesuits was summoned. Missions were established, and the intrepid priests pushed their way farther and farther into the wilderness. To this work, Champlain gave more and more of his thought in the last years of his life, which ended on Christmas day, 1635.
Among the young men whom Champlain set to work among the Indians was Jean Nicolet. The year before his death, Champlain sent him on an exploring expedition to the west, in the course of which he visited Lake Michigan and perhaps Lake Superior. Following in his footsteps, the Jesuits gradually established missions as far west as the Wisconsin River, and, finally, in 1670, at Sault Ste. Marie, the French formally took possession of the whole Northwest.
It was at about this time there appeared upon the scene another of those picturesque and formidable figures, in which this period of American history so abounds—Robert Cavalier La Salle. La Salle was at that time only twenty years of age. He had reached Canada four years earlier and had devoted himself for three years to the study of the Indian languages, in order to fit himself for the career of western exploration which he contemplated. One day he was visited by a party of Senecas, who told him of a river, which they called