Read the following excerpt from Captain John Smith, a trade book written during the early 1900s. In the excerpt below, Smith has just been captured by Powhatan's men. As you read, think about how the author presents Smith.
Smith, whose presence of mind never deserted him, immediately addressed himself to the task of diverting the chieftain’s mind from the recent unpleasant circumstances and with that end in view produced his pocket compass and presented it to the savage.
How could the author have been more objective about Smith in this excerpt?
A:He could have included less details about how Smith tricked the chief.
B:He could have included information about Smith's hopes and fears.
C:He could have added information about how Smith planned to free himself.
D:He could have left out information about Smith's presence of mind.
Answers
The Institute of Early American History and Culture is sponsored jointly by The College of William and Mary and The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Preparation of these volumes was made possible in part by a grant from the Research Materials Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency.
In addition to the major sponsorship of the agencies listed on p. v, editorial work on these volumes was assisted also by grants from the Jennings Charitable Trust, the Jane and Dan Gray Charitable Foundation, and the Sterling Morton Charitable Trust.
To the memory of all those who purposefully or accidentally have contributed to the preservation of the manuscripts, books, drawings, and maps that make it possible today to edit, annotate, index, and value the records of the past.
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FOREWORD
On December 21, 1980, the editor of these volumes, Philip L. Barbour, died in Petersburg, Virginia. He had turned eighty-two that same day and was en route to Williamsburg from Louisville, Kentucky, his hometown.
At the time of Mr. Barbour's death, each of the three volumes in the set was in a different stage of editing. For reasons that need not be explained here, Volume II had been prepared for the compositor first. By fall 1980 this volume was in page proof, and Mr. Barbour had had a chance to make final corrections. Volume I and Volume III had not yet been typeset, but for both of these volumes Mr. Barbour's editorial work was basically complete. In the case of Volume I, the manuscript had already been perused by a recognized authority on John Smith's period, and Mr. Barbour had responded to detailed criticisms and had been able to make appropriate changes. He had also approved most of the copy editing that had been done on the volume. The manuscript of Volume I, then, was entirely ready for the compositor by the end of 1980.
Volume III had not yet been sent to an outside reader for criticism prior to Mr. Barbour's death, nor had the manuscript been finally copy edited. It should be emphasized, however, that in the course of preparation of the manuscript, Mr. Barbour had been in regular consultation with editors at the Institute of Early American History and Culture, and his work had been scrutinized piecemeal. In consequence, neither the outside critical reading nor the final copy editing resulted in any significant changes in the manuscript.
The Institute did not have for Volumes I and III the benefit of Mr. Barbour's close reading of the galley and page proof, which has been a considerable handicap, especially in the case of the substantive footnotes. On the other hand, the copy text of all three volumes had been prepared by Mr. Barbour long before his death, and the faithfulness of the text presented here to that copy text has been authenticated by multiple oral readings of the copy text against the proofs by members of the Institute staff.
Mr. Barbour had undertaken only preliminary planning of the index before he died. Knowing, however, that preparation of the index was a task too massive for him at his advanced age and that page proof of Volume III would not be available for another year, he requested, only months before he died, that the Institute arrange to have Mrs. Alison M. Quinn take over the job, which she was able to do.
It was Mr. Barbour's goal to have his editorial tasks completed by 1980, the quadricentennial anniversary of Smith's birth, and happily this goal was achieved. We are grateful, too, that Mr. Barbour thought to ensure the financial health of the project by a provision in his will -- a complete surprise to the Institute staff -- assigning a portion of his estate for Institute use. The Barbour fund was critically important at the last stages of editorial and production work.
Thad W. Tate, Director Institute of Early American History and Culture
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The first attempt to present Capt. John Smith's works objectively and with sympathetic understanding of their character was made by Edward Arber in 1884. Before that, and since the days of their original printing, only scattered bits had been republished for one or another reason -- on occasion even merely to disparage or glorify the man or what he wrote, depending on the publisher's bent. Arber, perhaps spurred by the specific doubts raised in the nineteenth century regarding Smith personally, collected and reprinted all but one of the major works, and added thereto a considerable section dedicated to contemporary writings relevant to Smith's career. This work, entitled Captain John Smith ... Works, 1608-1631 (Birmingham, 1884), has now served for a century as the basic edition of Smith. Its excellence, rather than any want of assiduity on the part of more recent scholars, has certainly been responsible for the lack of a later edition. Yet modern research soon made a revision desirable, and that meant an edition that would supply such notes and comments as would make Smith more fully understandable.