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This portrait of Captain John Smith appeared on a 1616 map of New England. |
Four hundred years ago this summer, Capt. John Smith sailed up the Potomac and then the Rappahannock rivers to become the first Englishman to set foot on what was to become Stafford County.
To kick off this celebratory year, the Stafford County Historical Society last week heard "Keeper of the Knowledge" Marion Brooks Robinson recount the life and times of the adventurer who fought in France, Turkey and Hungary (where the Hapsburgs made him a captain for his heroics), as well as against Native Americans in Virginia, and who died in his bed in his native England in 1631 at the age of 51.
He also achieved immortality by, he said, being saved by Pocahontas from execution in 1607 by her father, Chief Powhatan, whose "kingdom" included what became Stafford County in 1664.
This most popular of early Colonial stories has been both vouched for and trashed by historians. John Smith is the only eye-witness who ever wrote about it. Keeper Robinson, 82, told the Society audience that she never believed it.
Smith was a leader of the original colonists who founded Jamestown in May 1607. As Robinson put it, Europeans came to the New World looking for two things: gold and the Northwest Passage shortcut to the riches of Asia.
Smith made two major explorations in search of both. He scoured every river that fed the Chesapeake Bay in search of the mythical shortcut, which finally led him up the Potomac and the Rappahannock to very different discoveries.
The "gold" he found in Stafford turned out to be iron pyrites and worthless. But he was on to something. In 1782, Thomas Jefferson first documented the presence of gold on the north side of the Rapphannock.
A quarter century later Virginia became one of the country's significant gold-producing states, including some 10 gold mines in southwest Stafford. Virginia reached its peak output just before the California gold rush of 1849.
Pushing up the Potomac during his initial major exploration of the Bay area in 1608, Smith first explored Stafford by taking his 30-foot shallop a short distance up Aquia Creek. He then returned to the river and first stepped ashore in the county at what is now Marlborough Point, adjacent to Crows Nest.
Smith then followed the Potomac to Great Falls, the head of navigation for the river, just beyond the future site of Washington, D.C., before returning to Jamestown.
A month later, on his second voyage, he reached the top of Chesapeake Bay and the Susquehanna River, exploring the Patuxent on the way back down and finally sailing up the Rappahannock.
This time he saw Stafford from the south side, dropping anchor between the future sites of Ferry Farm and Fredericksburg. Again he was blocked by the fall line, the Rappahannock's head of navigation. But Smith and his crew went ashore and continued on foot past Falmouth and got as far as an Indian encampment where Belmont is today.
There he and his crew unexpectedly found themselves in the middle of a fire fight between two Indian groups, the Algonquian and the Mattaponi and the Englishmen retreated to their boat and sailed home to Jamestown.
It was Smith's last major voyage. A year later, while asleep, the bag of gunpowder that most armed men kept fastened at their waist, ready to load and fight at a moment's notice, exploded. Smith was severely burned. It was called an accident. He was an iron-willed leader and a man with many enemies, but he was apparently felled by a stray spark. He was evacuated to England on the next ship and never returned to Virginia.
He recovered sufficiently to lead an expedition to New England in 1614, exploring Maine and Massachusetts Bay. A year later he attempted a second trip to the area but, in a fitting close to his adventures, he was seized by French pirates off the Azores. After weeks of captivity, he escaped, returned home and never left England again.
He met Pocahontas, briefly, for a last time, when she came to England in 1616 after marrying the colonist John Rolfe. Smith was living in London and writing books about his travels. They met socially and exchanged a few words. A year later, as the Rolfes were preparing to return to Virginia, she suddenly took ill and died.
Nothing of historic significance is named for the captain in Stafford, except, perhaps, Smith Lake Reservoir. There is a Smith Point on the Potomac, but it is in Maryland, directly across the river from the mouth of Aquia Creek, Smith's first landfall in Stafford County.
Hugh Muir: 540/735-1975
Email: hmuir@freelancestar.com
