Question

character sketch of John Smith

chapter- 6 - the life of John Smith ​

Answer 1

Answer:

A naval captain and explorer who had already lived a well-traveled—and, by his own account, quite sensational—life by the time he sailed to the New World with the fledgling Virginia Company in 1606. Smith was president of the English colony at Jamestown and as such often tasked with begging for food, help, and mercy from the surrounding Algonkian tribes. Townsend portrays him as something of a self-absorbed charlatan who has benefited from history in unfair ways. Much of what the world has come to know about Pocahontas and the Powhatan people, Townsend shows, comes from Smith’s own books and diaries, which were published to great sensationalism in the years after Pocahontas’s death—when she was not alive to refute Smith’s stories about her. Smith exaggerated his own bravery, intrepidness, and attractiveness to women in every tale he ever wrote, Townsend argues—and yet because his words confirmed the racist prejudices of white people and satisfied a cultural curiosity for details about the New World, they were believed and persisted throughout the centuries. One of the only truths Smith ever really told about Pocahontas, Townsend suggests, is an account of their final meeting in England, when Pocahontas and her second husband, John Rolfe, traveled to London in 1616. Pocahontas, upon seeing Smith for the first time in nearly 10 years, disparaged him as a traitor to her father in front of a small audience of people. Pocahontas’s excoriation of Smith characterized him as a man who lied, cheated, deceived, and treated those he should have respected as “stranger[s].” This ultimately mirrors Townsend’s own estimation of the man behind the legend of Captain John Smith